378 NATURAL HISTORY BULLETIN. 



among the teleutospores, the material having often been col- 

 lected after more or less of the winter had passed. The pores 

 shown are those actually seen, and although their position is 

 believed to be accurate, they are often less than the full num- 

 ber belonging to the spore. They have usually been drawn 

 from preparations untreated with acids or other clearing re- 

 agents. 



A certain amount of inaccuracy, or at least undesirable de- 

 viation, exists in descriptions of uredospores due to their being 

 seen in all possible positions. If they had pedicels or a suffi- 

 ciently elongated form, they would lie upon their sides, as most 

 teleutospores do, and their outline would present greater uni- 

 formity and be more readily interpreted. A few species, e. g\, 

 Puccinia vilfce, have uredospores with apex and base 

 conspicuously dissimilar, but in most species the scar left by 

 the falling away of the pedicel is the only orienting mark. In 

 the drawings the basal scar is indicated whenever it could be 

 made out, and in all such instances the spore is placed upright 

 on the plate. 



A word of explanation, and possibly of defense, may be 

 needed to justify the abandonment of the time-honored and 

 familiar names of P. graminis and P. coronaia for unfamil- 

 iar ones, which the strict application of the law of priority 

 has brought forward. Protests have been made from time to 

 time by able students of the order against the recognition of 

 the ascidial stage, and possibly of the uredo stage, in the selec- 

 tion of the oldest name. These protests are based in part upon 

 the difficult} 7 of identifying earlier names applied to these 

 stages, and the consequent instability of such a foundation for 

 nomenclature. But experience does not seem to bear out the 

 inference that the teleutosporic stage alone possesses such 

 marked superiority for specific identification. It is unfortun- 

 ately true that much doubt often attaches to the application of 

 early names, but an arbitrary contraction of the domain to be 

 covered by the law of priority does not seem to the writers to 

 be the right way to meet the difficulty. 



Many important investigations by students of the order dur- 

 ing the last three or four years have well established what has 



