AMERICAN POLEMONIACER. 121 
have no species; Asia and Europe together, two or three; 
South America perhaps fifteen, and the Atlantie United States 
about as many. The Pacifie States, with Mexico and British 
Columbia, have a hundred and fifty species, or more; and 
new ones are still yearly coming in from various parts of this 
great region whose botanieal products will not all be known 
for many decades to come. 
Many of our Polemoniaces are highly ornamental when in 
flower, and collectors have been accustomed to make speci- 
mens of them in this state only. The elaboration of the genera 
and species has been done, in the herbaria, in parts of the 
world very remote from the habitat of the plants, and the 
characters relied on have been those of the flower, chiefly of 
the corolla and gyncecium. This, which I conceive to have 
been an erroneous method of the systematists in relation to 
this order, was necessitated, in the first place, by collectors 
neglecting mature and fruiting specimens, and has in turn 
encouraged workers in the field to keep on as they had begun, 
making the flowering plant in all its beauty, the herbarium 
Subject, and leaving the ugly and often hardly manageable 
iting plants ungathered. 
The one general conclusion reached by me, after eighteen 
years of field experience with these plants is, that characters 
of form of corolla and length, insertion, direction, ete. of 
Stamens may be set aside as wholly incompetent to furnish 
means of defining genera; and that, by the calyx alone, es- 
pecially as it appears not in flower, but in its after develop- 
ments, in and of itself and in its relation to the fruit, we may 
limit and define good acceptable genera, made up of plants 
agreeing in habit, and in some other minor points. 
In order to make use of the characters indicated, we must, 
I think, entirely lay aside, what I conceive to be a mere preju- 
dice, the notion that the form of the corolla, and the direction 
of the stamens—whether erect and straight, or curved and 
declinate—need to be considered at all, in the matter of — 
eal diagnosis. At all events, that is the ground upon which 
the new elaboration I have in mind, will proceed. The 
