Because he cannot write Latin is no reason why his results 

 should not be considered. It certainly is a great convenience 

 to have descriptions printed in Latin, for those who can read 

 Latin, and it is a nuisance to have descriptions published in 

 any other except the tongue of the reader, but it is wrong 

 to carry the inconvenience to the point of invalidating botanical 

 work so published. 



The most pernicious thing in the judgment of the writer 

 is the whoksale splitting of genera which has become the sub- 

 stance of the Rrittonian system, since it vitiates the very pur- 

 pose, of scientific research. The purpose of science is to clarify, 

 to arrange in the genetic order, to make the complex simple, 

 1o make the difficult easy, to clear away the rubbish so that 

 those who follow us can take up our work where we left ofF 

 and ultimately bring out all the underlying facts and explain 

 causes of natural phenomena. There 'is no one mind that 

 can carr>- even a small part of the botanical facts in 

 systematic botany, no one mind that can carry the genetic rela- 

 tionships of plants without grouping them. The object of bot- 

 anists since the time of Pliny has been to so arrange facts that 

 the student and worker in Nature can grasp and hold them. 

 One system has fallen before another. Linnaeus made a great 

 step in advance when he invented his system based on stamens 

 and pistils which grouped related plants in a marvelous way 

 to the men of his time. But that has fallen before the system 

 of Bentham and Hooker and those who preceded them, while 

 this has again given way to the last so-called natural systenl 

 which brings related species and higher groups still closer to- 

 gether so that they can be most easily grasped and the facts of 

 genetic relationship better understood. A most admirable 

 system has been thus gradually built up historically. The fam- 

 ily and subfamily combine the greater groups but the key to 

 the whole is the genus which has obtained since the time of 

 Linnaeus and even before. This has held the middle ground 

 between the species and the family. What the family and the 

 subfamily are to the higher groups the genus and subgenus 

 .-ire to the middle groups next above the species. One can 

 readily see what havoc the raising of the subfamily to the 



