NEW OR CRITICAL SPECIES OF ACER. 5 
one more to the list of species; and if during the subsequent 
sixteen years I have published only two or three others, it has 
not been for want of unclassified material accumulated in my 
own and other herbaria, but cheifly because certain specific 
names long current can not with certainty be applied to any one 
or another of these species. For instance: the Californian species 
first made known, Calais Douglasii, DC. (Microseris Douglasii, 
Sch. Bip. in Pollichia, xxii-xxiv, 308 (1866) ; Gray, Proc. Am. 
Acad. viii. 210 (1873) is so vaguely characterized as to be wholly 
unrecognizable by the original description, which applies equally 
well to any one of some ten or a dozen species that are known. 
It is even very manifest from the several different diagnoses that 
have been made, first by De Candolle, then by Hooker and Arnot, 
and lastly by Asa Gray, upon the original materials as preserved 
in the Candollean and Kew Gardens herbaria, that the species is 
_ 4n aggregate, as existing in the very type specimens. Gray him- 
self still more widely extended it; and I everywhere, even in my 
Bay-Region Manual, have consciously left under that name (just 
as Gray had done) species with white pappus-palex, others show- 
ing them straw-colored, and some with palex of a dark smoky 
_ brown or almost black ; and some having glabrous, others vari- 
ously pubescent palee. I am persuaded, and long have been, 
that such characters as these are of specific value. And, as it is 
useless, and also very unscientific to use names for species which, 
however long in use, can not with even any probability of correct- 
ness, be applied to any particular segregate, I reject, in this 
paper, the name M. Douglasii altogether. I shall give, first of 
all, a segregation of the various elements of the M. Douglasit of 
Asa Gray’s writings and my own. Several of the names here 
published, have existed in manuscript, in my herbarium for 
eighteen and twenty years. 
Supplementing the wealth of Microseris materials gathered by 
myself in California between the years 1882 and 1895, and largely 
retained in my own herbarium, I have before me all that has been 
deposited in the herbarium of the California Academy, In this I 
find proof of Miss Eastwood’s great zeal and diligence in collect- 
ing these plants during recent years. A number of the new 
