79 
no other botanist could do, for she is in every way best fitted to do 
such a work justice, but failing in that the field is open for others. 
The writer hopes that’Mr. Jepson may successfully complete the 
herculean task he has assumed, and that before it is too late he mav 
modify his methods and improve the quality of his work and let 
others labor alongside of him without friction. The work can 
never become a school manual because of its bulk and cost. There 
will be a clear field for Prof. Hall or some other botanist to sup- 
ply that crying need of a handy and compact school book on Cal- 
ifornian botany. 
The writer is puzzled by two things, the constant reference to 
the collections of the author and the almost complete ignoring of 
those of others especially Miss Eastwood, Mrs. Brandegee, etc., 
and the constant reference to Jepson’s little Flora and the almost 
constant ignoring of the great Flora by Watson. Whether the au- 
thor is using his own collections to the exclusion of others in his 
class work and his own little Flora to the exclusion of that of 
Watson in his teaching or whether he considers them paramount 
is not stated, but one would suppose that a great work costing 
$49 to $52 would have space to refer to the collections of all botan- 
ists and to the publications of all his predecessors. If this is his 
real plan for the whole book and the enormous amount of botan- 
ical work done in the state by others is to be ignored then the book 
might as well be thrown in the scrap heap at once. The writer 
of this has himself collected nearly two thousand species in the 
state alone, and his collections contain several score of types of 
new species. Mrs. Brandegee and Miss Eastwood have doubtless 
collected still more, also Parish, Hall, Bolander, Lemmon, etc. In 
addition to the ignoring of Watson’s Flora we find no mention of 
Greene’s Flora Fran. and Botany of the Bay region, Abram’s 
Flora of Los Angeles, and Ball's work on the willows. 
The work is of course not free from typographical errors such 
as Salix glauca L. (1853) instead of (1753). : 
The author’s conception of the meaning of botanical terms 
might be improved both in this and his little Flora. Samples are 
“circumscissile, splitting at the middie;”’ “glandular, ‘bearing 
glands or having a surface which exudes a sticky or viscid liq- 
uid ;” “habit, general aspect or hue of a plant ;” “lenticular, shaped 
like a lens ;” “loculicidal, a capsule splitting longitudinally into the 
backs of the cells ;” “indument, with a close pubescence or coat of 
_hairs:” “nate, a termination meaning divided ;” “nigrescent, be- 
