284 RETIREMENT, TO 1897 : BOTANICAL WORK 



old Indian authors were often impossible to recognise, thanks 

 to insufficient data and incomplete characters. Even in 

 Eoxburgh's careful work, a good many species could not be 

 guessed at ; in many of his otherwise excellent drawings, 

 Hooker felt sure that the enlarged fruit figures did not belong 

 to the plant named. 



Every detail therefore had to be worked over anew. And 

 when this ' laborious job ' was done, it would be so far unsatis- 

 factory that no ' good sections ' i.e. clear subdivisions could 

 be found in the genus. 



As he puts it to Mr. La Touche (April 23, 1894) : 



[The Grasses] are dreadfully difficult and systematically 

 a chaos of imperfect descriptions, erroneous identifications, 

 confused synonymy and imbecile attempts. We have up- 

 wards of a century of collections and not an attempt at a 

 classification. Each Botanist in his own country has worked 

 at his sweet will in ignorance of his predecessors' and 

 contemporaries' work, with imperfect materials and often 

 no books * Hinc illae lachrymae.' 



' I think,' he grimly remarks, ' my results will open the 

 eyes of Botanists.' (To T. H. Huxley, August 16, 1894.) 



A further complexity was introduced into the difficulties of 

 the subject by the fact that a set of the Indian Andnpogont 

 had been sent to Professor Hackel 1 to be worked up for his 

 Monograph on the Order. 



I have been trying Hackel's Monograph [he writes 

 on May 24, 1893] and find it most difficult to work with. 

 For diagnostic characters he prefers the most obscure and 

 difficult to detect, to the obvious and natural. I long to see 

 another Kunth 2 in Germany. 



Panicum is in a chaotic condition ; there is a pile of 

 materials five or six feet high from half a dozen collections, 



1 Eduard Hackel, an Austrian, one of the greatest authorities on grasses, 

 the author of various papers and publications on the grasses of Carpathia, 

 Portugal, Spain, and the Alpes Maritimes. He has published a monograph on 

 Andropogon and one upon Festuca. Professor in a gymnasium at St. Polten. 



* Carl Sigismund Kunth, botanist. He published his Flora Berolinensis 

 in 1813 ; revision of various Natural Orders as Bignoniaceae, Leguminosae, 

 Malvaceae, Tiliaceae, Gramineae. &c. His Nova Genera and Species Plantarum 

 appeared 1815-25. 



