West AMERICAN PHASES OF THE GENUS 
POTENTILLA. 
Even excluding Horkelia and Ivesia, the genus, like Ribes 
and Saxifraga, is unsatisfactory as embracing plants widely 
diverse in habit, inflorescence and floral structure. Take 
such common and widely dispersed species as Potentilla 
Anserina and P. fruticosa, and a philosophical botanist, set 
free from the domination of early bias, and capable of placing 
himself for the moment outside the sphere of book botany 
conventionalities, will not like to regard them as of one and 
the same genus, until, putting all the wide differences of mode 
of growth, foliage, and flower arrangement out of view, he 
severs a single flower from each plant and compares these 
organs alone. Then alone does it become easy to place the 
two species under one generic name. And as great dis- 
crepancies are seen by comparing a perfect plant of either of 
the two named with, for example, P. arguta, or any Old or 
New World species of the habitual group to which that one 
belongs. 
There have not been wanting eminent phytographers to 
contend for the separating of the old Potentilla into several 
genera, for the resolving of Ribes into three or four, and of 
Saxifraga into ten or twelve. And there really seem to be, 
in the nature of the plants and in the structure of their - 
flowers, as many reasons for the setting off of Ribesia, Rob- 
sonia, Grossularia and Siphocalyx from Ribes, as Richard 
and Spach proposed, as for the retainiug of Horkelia, Sib- 
baldia and Ivesia apart from Potentilla ; and any anthologi- 
cal argument that has been employed in defense of those 
three, makes equally in favor of even Haworth's extreme 
views regarding the limitation of Saxifraga. 
95 * — Issued November 8, 1887, 
