BOTANICAL LITERATURE. 241 
tologist. And, if these first written characters were by an 
author who knew more about his species than the herbarium 
specimens could show, then his own descriptive phrases are 
of the very highest value. About three hundred and forty of 
the new species in the first volume of the work under consider- 
. ation were described by. Nuttall, who had not received his 
specimens, dead and dried and tied up in bundles; he had 
collected them himself, and the greater part of them had been 
seen in their native localities by no other botanist's eye but 
his own. Nuttall is the author of more than two-thirds of all 
the vast ageregate of new species which enrich and render of 
immortal value this old book. It was his pen that supplied 
the manuscript, sometimes of entire and successive pages 
that are filled with descriptions of the novelties he had dis- 
covered on his great western tour! I am careful to indicate 
thus particularly this botanist's large, and even well nigh all- 
important part in the actual authorship of the Flora, because 
of certain expressions, made more or less recently, which 
Seem to voice such a misunderstanding as this would be, 
that Nuttall served the chief compiler of the Flora in the 
capacity of a mere collector of many novelties described in 
the book; that he did no more than place his bundled 
Specimens ard copious field notes in the hands of his young 
Successor at Harvard College, to be written up and printed 
y him. 
I have certainly read in an editorial of an American serial, 
this year, that Nuttall did not publish the species which are 
eredited to him in Torrey and Gray. Ina still more recent 
paper, published in an Academy Bulletin, I read a commen- 
dation of Nuttall's field notes on a certain genus, in Torrey 
and Gray; which sounds as if Nuttall were the author of 
certain notes, but perhaps not of the specifie characters ; and 
this in a genus which was, upon the whole, better known by 
pu and its spe | better defined byt him p we, who live 
! See Torr. & Gray, i. pp. 95—98, 267, 276 —278, 326 & 327, 343, 350—353, 
` . ünd so on, to the énd of the volume. 
