ESCHSCHOLTZIA. 211 
editor might well have given such answer, and so might have 
saved himself the misfortune of that paragraph in which every 
implication and assertion that relates to me—and none will 
doubt that against me alone every line of it was written—is 
truthless. Not the kind of misrepresentation that is conscious 
and intentional, certainly. It was only a case of speaking with- 
out knowing; of listening to a prattler who had a grievance, 
and willingly going into print with the prattle, trusting it might 
_ be true, but without waiting to investigate. 
In respect to the work of twenty years ago, what I did upon 
Eschscholtzia was accomplished with ease and quickly. - The 
present attempt, on the contrary, has proven the most try- 
ing and difficult of all taxonomic tasks I have undertaken hith- 
erto, The accumulations of herbarium material have, within 
the twenty years, become augmented perhaps twenty-fold; and 
_ the difficulties of classification, if partly diminished by the 
abundance of data, are also in a measure increased thereby ; for 
80 great sacrifice of time is involved in strict and careful com- 
parisons, that one is tempted, often through weariness, to neg- 
lect it, to the confusion of things that are distinguishable and 
ought therefore to be separated. 
To one who knows many Eschscholtzias in their native 
haunts, nothing is more certain that the habit differs widely in 
different species ; some at their perpection of development form- 
ing extensive mats of prostrate branches, and bearing countless 
flowers and pods on short peduncles in what seem the forks of 
the branches, Others at the same stage show no stem or branch 
at all, but only a tuft of leaves and a mass of scape-like pedun- 
cles upright from amid them. And there are species between 
Which, at their maturity of growth, this habital difference is 
More distinctive than any other marks they bear. Yet one of 
these may be the denizen of a sea beach or bluff, subject to sea 
fog and spray, the other peculiar to some sunburnt desert, it 
may be fifty or it may be five hundred miles inland ; so that of 
their specific distinctness there could be no doubt were they 
more alike than they are. But what is the herbarium botanist 
