BOTANICAL LITERATUKE. 99 



recent bibliography of those familiar species of Wild Beans. 

 The nomenclature of them under Phaseolus, which was all 

 wrong in former editions of the Manual, had lately been set 

 right by an author in New York, Will not this new surprise 

 of a Slrophostyles movement be likely to get construed as 

 additional evidence of Harvard's extreme aversion to being 



corrected from Columbia ? 



It is easily conceivable that this task of revising the old 

 Manual may have been more or less unwelcome at a place 

 where there was already too much other and more important 

 business waiting to be done. Many errors in the text are 

 such as will creep in where an editor, hard-pressed for time, 

 is hastening to make an em\ of a wearisome piece of botanical 

 drudgery. Only so may it have come to pass that of the two 

 species of Nelumho mentioned, one is put in the feminine, 

 the other in the neuter gender ; and that Geranium colnm- 

 hinwn is left without an author, as if the authorship had been 

 unknown. But the errors in nomenclature, citation and the 

 like, are too many for us to recount them ; besides, these are 

 faults which the old editions have in common with the new ; 

 and even errors in the old, are in the new edition replaced, 

 not by corrections but by other old errors. These will 

 perhaps do little real harm ; and, while the book will be 

 useful— just as a mere reprint of the Fifth Edition would 

 have been usef ul^to beginners, and especially those destined 

 to make no more than the school-child's beginnings at botany, 

 it will be telling to many old friends of the book and of the 

 place which it comes from, the unwelcome news that Harvard 

 University is declining from its former place at the head of the 

 list of well-manned and learnedly conducted schools of botany 

 in America. To other old friends, the criticisms, undeferential 

 at least, when not unsparing, which greeted the Sixth Edition^s 

 first appearing, will have announced something like the col- 

 lapse of an autocracy which, while doing much service in its 

 own way, had, in some of its aspects, appeared to sit as an 

 incubus on the botanical mind of the country at large for 

 many years. 



