A New Rocky Mountain Botany. 97 



new epoch in the history of Rocky Mountain botany. Col- 

 lectors and students have been very actively engaged during the 

 interim; new si)ecies and forms have been discovered and de- 

 scribed, many of the older ones have been critically studied and 

 their relationships determined, our system of nomenclature has 

 been gradually evolving, and all of these features have con- 

 spired to make the preparation of a new flora exceedingly de- 

 sirable. But to bring all of this scattered work together must 

 have involved an infinite amount of labor and patience. And 

 it is very humiliating to admit that this labor has been greatly 

 increased by the rapid and careless work of many so-called 

 systematists. Perhaps no large area has suffered more from 

 errors due to superficial studies and lack of coordination of 

 results than has this western part of North America. The 

 tourist collector, the local botanist aspiring to fame, the eastern 

 and European specialist who often fails to realize the great 

 range of variation in our ecologic conditions and the resulting 

 plant forms, have united in loading us down with a wealth of 

 synon}ms and disconnected, unrecognizable "species" which 

 is appalling. In preparing a flora it is necessary to look into these 

 projwsals, selecting and incorporating the good, rejecting and 

 reducing to synonomy the bad. This, we may well imagine, 

 was the most troublesome task which Professor Nelson had before 

 him, and the Manual reflects the results of his discriminating 

 labor. 



As a test of the extent to which reductions have been made, 

 the reviewer has gone carefully through the Compositae, in 

 which 538 species are recognized. He finds, in this family, that 

 283 species proposed since the issuance of Gray's Synoptical 

 Flora in 1886 are here treated as straight synonyms, 16 species 

 have been reduced to varieties, while 12 are mentioned as being 

 insufficiently known. Meanwhile 186 species proposed during 

 the same period are accepted. To the total of 311 species re- 

 jected, reduced, or merely mentioned, must be added, however, 

 a considerable number of recently proposed species which are 

 in no wise accounted for, presumably from Professor Nelson's 

 inability to comprehend them from the descriptions, so that 

 nearly two- thirds of the new species of Compositae proposed 

 in the last twenty-four years have already gone by the board. 



