1907] Hall. Compositae of Southern California. 5 



of the larger groups into their component parts as it has taken 

 place in nature. Much of our recent work, however, has un- 

 fortunately consisted of a mere cutting across the grain, the result 

 being a mass of chips, the so-called species, each being a pure- 

 ly artificial product and bearing no evident relationship to the 

 others. This is commonly the result of hasty work where the 

 perpetrator has been too busy to work out natural affinities 

 through a comparision of intergrading forms accompanied by 

 field study. 



In the matter of generic limits the author has also been 

 rather conservative. Realizing the futility of any effort to 

 establish genera all of which are of equal rank, he has chosen to 

 follow the lines laid down by earlier workers so far as possible 

 rather than to attempt a readjustment, with its inevitable ac- 

 companiment of name-changes. Throughout the paper an 

 attempt has been made to follow the International Eules of 

 Nomenclature as laid down by the Vienna Congress of 1905. 



COLLECTIONS. 



Although handicapped by not being able to examine speci- 

 mens in the older herbaria of Eastern North America and Europe, 

 I have seen the Compositae in practically all the California her- 

 baria, and studied them in the field during a period of about 

 twelve years v The loan of material from certain of the larger 

 eastern herbaria has also been of considerable assistance. 



My work having been prosecuted mainly at the University of 

 California, the Herbarium of that institution has naturally sup- 

 plied the bulk of the material from which the descriptions are 

 drawn. The collection contains nearly all of the sets recently 

 distributed from Southern California, as well as a nearly complete 

 set of the plants collected on the State Geological Survey, 1860- 

 1864. 



During the spring of 1906 some three weeks were spent at San 

 Diego in working through the Compositae in the Herbarium of 

 Mr. and Mrs. T. S. Brandegee. This herbarium was helpful 

 especially because of the data supplied concerning the distribu- 

 tion of species along our southern and eastern borders and because 



