84 
would have no difficulty in placing them, but when the splitters get 
at them we find the floating aquatilis in Batrachium though it is 
often creeping late in the season, and the creeping multifidus which 
is often floating early in the season is placed in Ranunculus. We 
find the stoloniferous Cymbalaria in Halerpestes and the semi- 
stoloniferous or creeping repens in Ranunculus. We find the 
pretty Nuttall’s buttercup in Cyrtorrhyncha and its close relatives 
of the adoneus group in Ranunculus, and so even the expert comes 
out of it all with his mind befogged so long as he assumes that 
the splitters have any botanical judgment worth following. In 
the treatment of Sedum and Cotyledon Britton and Rose have 
gone to the limit of absurdity, basing their generic characters on 
things like the leaf-shape and varying adhesion of the carpels 
which are known to have no permanence. Saxifraga, a loosely ag- 
gregated genus though well definable on the whole, is split up 
beyond all possible recognition and on trivial characters. We 
find the heucheroid James’s saxifrage in Telesonix, the delicate 
adscendens in Muscaria, the Virginian one in Micranthes and the 
very different arguta in the same genus, and the yellow saxifrage 
in Leptasea while the very different bronchialis is in the same 
genus. All this shows the utter lack of all system and consistency 
in the subdivision of Saxifraga. Time and space would prevent 
giving all the unscientific work of this kind from the ferns to the 
Composite. 
Taking up the species proposed as segregates from other well 
known ones we find that here is where the ignorance of some of 
our eastern botanists is monumental, especially in matters of 
ecology, and bearing on the effects of aridity, alkalinity and high 
temperatures combined with low humidity. We find them gravely 
describing as new species forms of annuals which extend into 
warmer regions where they survive over sevral seasons and even 
at times become woody below. We find them making new species 
out of thin-leaved plants which happen to extend down into places 
which have a little alkali in the soil which makes the leaves thicker, 
or which happen to grow in a more arid region and so develop 
thicker and smaller leaves like Prunus Virginiana which becomes 
demissa in a drier climate. or which Secomes Prunus melanocarpa 
when its fruit ripens in the normal wav. When Ribes lacustre 
ripens too hastily by being nearly frostbitten and its fruit does not 
blacken but remains red then it is R. lentum. When the service- 
- berry grows in southern Utah on exposed rocks and is scraggly 
