I4 BOTANICAL GAZETTE. 



there are investigators in this country who have adopted the latter 

 without any thought of the need of 'he former, and their observations 

 are "as utterly barren of important results as an undigested weather 

 record." The pages of our scientific periodicals are sometimes bur- 

 dened with such material. 



Editor Gazette : — Your note about oaks on page 2 of the Jan- 

 uary number puts a greater responsibility on me than I am capable to 

 bear. I have seen of Buckley's Oaks only miserable and incomplete 

 dried specimens and could therefore only make guesses and sugges- 

 tions on them and not "decisions." How important and necessaiy it 

 is for a "closet-botanist" to occasionally refresh his botanical vision 

 by communing with living nature I have seen on my extended visits 

 to the Pacific States and the Rocky Mountains. My observations 

 there have furnished new views and suggested different corrections of 

 former statements ; a few of them you printed in the last number, 

 others will follow. But I must confess that I am not any farther ad- 

 vanced in the knowledge of those Texas Oaks, never having had the 

 opportunity to study them in numerous and complete herbarium speci 

 mens nor having seen them growing. Buckley's Quercus Texana is 

 undoubtedly correctly placed by him with the polymorphous Q. rubra. 

 — G. Engelmann. 



No department of botany seems to the average botanist so un- 

 satisfactory and perplexing as that of Fossil Botany. We all know 

 how difficult it is to name plants when the specimens are only tolera 

 bly complete, but to name them from the merest fragments of stems and 

 leaves is something that must border very closely upon guess work. 

 Such naming too becomes of very great importance when the age o f 

 formations rests upon the evidence of fossil plants. It would some- 

 times seem as if the botanist started in with the idea that the frag- 

 ments must of necessity belong to genera and species unlike any living 

 in the same region. Still some splendid work has been done and our 

 countryman, Mr. Lesquereux, has had by no means the least share in 

 it. As an instance of the uncertainty of such work at the best. Mr 

 J. Starkie Gardner, in a bite copy of Nature, speaks of Dr Heer's 

 work upon the fossil flora of Madeira. The terminal leaflets of a 

 Rubus were referred to Corylus, and the various leaflets of another 

 species of Rubus were referred to Corylus, Ulmus and Psoralea, and so 

 on in several other instances. 



Of the multiplication of species there is no end. The col- 

 lector's first ambition is to find new species and when that is gratified 

 and many new species bear the discoverer's name, the next ambition i: 

 to name the new species himself. It is not very hard, nor does it take 

 many appliances to name and describe a species as new, but it is very 

 hard and it takes the greatest command of appliances to discover the 

 fact of its being really new. One generation coins specific names, a 

 large percentage of which apptar in the synonymy of the next genera- 

 tion. Any one looking over the species of Torre y and Gray's Flora o 1 " 

 a generation ago and then hunting in Watson's Index to see what has 



