376 Systematic Botany. [zoe 



when we see a new monograph from men who would not know 

 their own new species if they saw them alive, and we find them 

 bristling with botanical sports as new species, j-pcrts which field 

 study would have avoided. A certain genus recenth^ mono- 

 graphed I tried to use and found that I had to open a seed vessel 

 on every plant that grew in a certain patch and all n.anifestly 

 from the same seed; out of the patch I had to make about three 

 species. Some years ago I had the same laughable experience 

 in patches of Baeria in California, also in patches of Layia; and 

 two years ago I had the same experience with Townsendia, out 

 of which I had to make two species from the same seed, and had 

 a quantity of nondescript material left still waiting to be chris- 

 tened. There are dozens of genera that are as badly tangled as 

 these. 



I think this confusion has arisen primarily from the absence 

 of field study on the part of the author of the species, and 

 secondarily from carelessness in describing species, coupled with 

 a false theory that paucity of words is conciseness. The most 

 concise botanist of the last generation was the one who used the 

 most words in describing his species, and the most verbose were 

 the ones who seemed to delight in what they called " short and 

 concise" descriptions, which have proved to be only epitaphs of 

 unknown species buried in their herbaria, and which we western 

 men now and then duplicate from no fault of ours. In the first 

 place, few of us can aflford to go East to find out what these 

 species are like, and in the second place, we are not responsible 

 for the sins of our botanical fathers and grandfathers who have 

 caused this state of things. That we have kept up with the 

 literature of the day and have used every means in our power to 

 avoid mistakes goes without saying, and some of us have even 

 gone East to study types, but it is a hardship that should not 

 be required of us. Let the closet botanist first describe his own 

 species so that they can be recognized by the descriptions alone 

 before he attempts to make new ones for the field botanist, else 

 he will cause to become a conviction what is now arising as a 

 suspicion that imperfect descriptions are not due wholly to igno- 

 rance. If it is not possible to get accurate descriptions of 

 western species made by closet botanists, then eastern botan- 



