go Muhlenbergia, Volume 4 
all possible read these papers for himself, but I shall attempt to 
give a brief outline of them. 
Professor Bessey’s paper is in substance a complaint against 
the present order of things. He thinks the taxonomic workers 
of to-day, or the most of them, areincompetent. The following 
are some of his views: 
“I have yet to find a man who has not felt that all of his 
species were conservatively made, and that had he been radically 
inclined he could have made many more. And yet the fact 
remains that much of the species making of recent years has 
rendered it vastly more difficult than formerly for us to obtain a 
grasp of the flora of a region. Instead of helping us, this per- 
verted notion of the purpose and the proper limitation of spe- 
cies has actually proved to be a hindrance. How much, for ex- 
ample, does the average botanist know nowadays about the spe- 
cies of Crataegus? It will not avail to say that ‘the knows as 
much as he ever did,’ for once he did study them somewhat, but 
now he is compelled to pass them by as quite too difficult for 
him to undertake to distinguish with the time he has at his 
command. The inordinate multiplication of species has hin- 
dered instead of advanced our knowledge, and this fact is suffi- 
cient tocondemn it utterly. Wearein danger of destroying the 
usefulness of taxonomy in our zeal for describing every differing 
form as a separate species. We havé lost sight of the primitive 
reason for the formation of species, namely, that we should have 
fewer things to hold in mind. Primitively the aim was to have 
as few species as possible. Now too often we look upon the 
addition of new species as a contribution to knowledge, when, 
on the contrary, it may be a hindrance.” 
‘““We are forced to the conclusion that we have rather fool- 
ishly spent our time in discussing the less important matters of 
nomenclature, while we have permitted anarchy to thrive in the 
far more important work of the making of species. We have 
had botanical congresses which formulated laws in regard to the 
naming of species, but as to the making of species each botanist 
