- January 6, 1909 93 
term can not with propriety be ted in the sense intended here. 
The horticulturalist who by process of cultivation and cross- 
breeding produces a distinct form is a “maker,” but not he who 
describes what he finds already “made” in nature. He may 
give names to things which have have characters too feeble to 
enable them to be distinguished, but he does not make the char- 
acters. 
9. The sentiment of this paragraph is also beyond reproach, 
but it certainly does contradict some of Professor Bessey’s pre- 
viously expressed ideas. He thinks individual freedom should 
be abolished, and that we should be allowed to publish species 
only in designated journals, and only after the consent of certain 
men has been obtained. How are we to exercise our ‘“experi- 
ence” if the power of exercising it is taken from us and given to 
some man a thousand miles away, who probably never had any 
field experience worth mentioning, who never saw any of the 
plants of our region in the living state, and is utterly unquali- 
fied to pass upon them, except through the pitiable knowledge 
gained by much examination of dried specimens, or plant mum- 
mies, if you wish ? 
11. A direct argument in favor of the maximum number 
of species. In order to have brevity and conciseness we must 
allow a high state of differentiation. The greater the number 
of recognized species, the shorter may be the descriptions neces- 
sary to distinguish them. 
And this also disposes of the twelfth proposition, for it 
shows the opposite from what Professor Bessey intended. It 
lays bare the fallacy of the minimum number of species theory. 
In order to reduce the number of species we must use “long and 
complex descriptions” if we wish to include all the characters of 
our composite species; and if we shorten the description it falls 
under proposition 10—“a species that is not distinguishable by 
its diagnosis has no right to existence.” When we leave out a 
lot of the characters from a diagnosis, the species is certainly not 
“distinguishable.” 
