BOTANICAL GAZETTE. 151 



While a certain amount of patience can be retained in sifting 

 his work upon forms which he himself saw and studied, this cannot 

 be said with reference to his other work, for he had the pernicious 

 habit of establishing genera and species upon descriptions 

 and very imperfect descriptions too, of forms which he had 

 never seen. For instance, his Florida Ludoviciana con- 

 tains the descriptions of 30 new genera and 196 new species, 

 not one of which had he ever seen, not one of which had even 

 been collected, and all based upon the imperfect descriptions of a 

 Mr. Robin, a man who did not know a Ranunculus from a Polygo- 

 num. The amusing part of it is that Rafinesque accepts Robin's 

 identifications when there is no description, but whenever a few 

 words of description are appended, the plant cannot be what Mr. 

 Robin called it, cannot be anything before described, and hence 

 must be a new genus or species. Thus he went to work upon the 

 various writings of such botanists as Pursh,Nuttall, Elliott, Torrey, 

 etc., and whenever they expressed any doubt as to the relationship 

 of a certain form, a new species or genus would be established. 

 Dr. Torrey's account of the plants collected by Dr. James, in Long's 

 Expedition, yielded to the fertile imagination of Rafinesque 20 new 

 genera ! Dr. Gray mentions one instance he happened to know 

 about, where our botanist mistook an undeveloped Bupleurum for 

 a grass, and described it as a new genus of Graminece. Being told 

 of his mistake he published it as a new genus "near to Bupleurum. 1 ' 

 He furnishes probably the only instance of a botanist persistently 

 desiring to dedicate a genus to himself. The genus proposed 

 just as persistently refused to stand and in despair he provides half 

 a dozen Rafinesquias, from which botanists may take their choice. 

 I know not whether his desire in this particular has ever been grat- 

 ified. In the Flora Telluriana he begins in earnest the business of 

 making genera, proposing, as has been said, to establish 1000 

 new genera. To give the cases referred to in the Am. Jour. Set. ; 

 "Allium was divided into 15 genera; Solidago into 7, with about 

 twice as many sub-genera; Saxifraga into 12 genera, which are 



ful or perhaps sub-genera." Of this whole regiment of genera 

 marched to the front to stand the fire of criticism but 12, a corpor- 

 al's guard, survive in the region covered by Gray's Manual, viz: 

 Adlumia, Polan/sia, Cladrastis, Osmorrhiza, Lejwcht/s, FrechtJiites, 

 llysanthes, Blephilia, Peltandra, Clintonia,I)iarrhena, and Eatonia, 

 and Bentham and Hooker have slain some of these. The fact is 

 that Rafinesque's work is so unreliable that he has not even re- 

 ceived the credit that he deserves, and some of his names ought to 

 have been retained that were disregarded. Never was there a finer 

 field open to the enterprising botanist than this country presented 

 to Rafinesque when he landed here in 1802. No one made any 



