

49 



GREENE AND HIS SPECIES. 



In a brochure of rot long ago E. L. Greene complains of the 

 way the botanical public has received his proposed new species, 

 intimating personal prejudice. He shews that in certain cases he 

 is no worse than Coulter, Fernald, Rydberg, Nelson and others, 

 and he cocs to great length to quote new species, proving that 



many authors have greatly increased the species in floras over the 

 plants recognized a generation ago. This kind of special pleading 

 is always the stock argument when a man is wrong. Because Fer- 

 nald and Coulter got in the mud over their shoe tops and Greene 

 and Rydberg over their heads is no proof that the former are 

 muddy and the latter clean. Because a generation ago half of the 

 flora was almost unknown is no evidence that the present increase 

 of species is due to changed views among real botanists as to spe- 

 cific limitations. Greene is always side-stepping the main issue, 

 which is this, Do his species represent stable p'ant forms, or are 

 they individual variations? We who study our plants as they grow 

 in the field and by thousands know that 95$ of his species have 

 no foundation in fact, and no amount of botanical juggling or 

 dust throwing can obscure that fact. The indictment western bot- 

 anists bring against him is that he is grossly ignorant of primary 

 facts in plant ecology or deliberately dishonest. His work on Esch- 

 scholtzia and Apocynum is the acme of botanical drivel, as every 

 one but himself knows, and diners in no essential particular from 

 a typhoid fever patient in the last stages picking at the bedding. 

 As'to personal prejudice it is unfortunate that one's most intimate 

 acquaintances say the hardest things. The private character of a 

 man is a real part of his scientific character for on that depends 

 his reliability. If a person says as Greene did before he left Cali- 

 fornia that he would devote the rest of his life to undo the work 

 of Asa Gray, he has no one but himself to blame if the botanical 

 public sees in that an adequate explanation for his erratic treat- 

 ment of Grayan genera and species. That Gray, the greatest bot- 

 anist this country ever knew/ overestimated his closet kowledge ol 

 western plants is now generally accepted, but his autocratic work 

 in trying to suppress the publication of new sprcies by Greene and 

 myself is not so well known, but it is a fact. The files of the Tor- 

 rey Bulletin and Botanical Gazette in the eighties will show that 

 both journals were as subservient as the former became flagrantly 

 insurgent after the death of Gray and Watson, for they published 





