40 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
having lived through the century, accomplished a botanical work 
as great as the greatest that the century knew, and ended his 
career comparatively unknown. In this he stands alone among 
botanical celebrities of that century. 
The reader will be wishing to be shown wherein lies the 
greatness of this merely local flora. We shall answer first, and in 
a general way, that it is not primarily as a great Botany of,the 
Pyrenees Mountains that Bubani’s “Flora Pyrenaea”’ is deeply 
interesting and instructive. Its greatness lies largely in its origin- 
ality; the strong points wherein it differs from every other book 
of descriptive botany that was ever written. What science in all 
its departments, and in every generation of its progress, hails 
with the most cordial welcome, is the book that is original; the 
work, be it large or be it small, wherein the thoughts of an inde- 
pendantly thinking and sane mind find freedom and fulness of 
expression. Science is always waiting—often long and wearily 
waiting—for the man and his book who will lift it out of the old 
ruts. 
Bubani has his own views about what constitutes sound and 
rational botany; his own ideas as to the philosophy of plant 
affinities, and the arrangement and sequence of families; opinions 
quite strongly opposed to those now prevailing as to the limit 
of genera and of species, the descriptions of them and their nomen- 
clature. In all these parts and adjuncts of descriptive botany 
he has wrought out his scheme so carefully, so laboriously and 
so fully that it will be to any who study the work no wonder that 
the half of his time during forty years was occupied with reading, 
reflecting, arranging and writing out the matter that fills the 
four thick quartos of his work. 
As to description, whether of families, genera or species, he 
abjures it, save only in case of new or rare species that have not 
before been adequately described; for the rest, only names and 
synonyms and the authors of them find expression. ‘To those 
for whom Bubani writes there is no need of the descriptions. 
Thousands of the species which he catalogues have been known 
for many centuries, and have been described in many hundreds 
of different books. This fact, as he tells us in his Preface, is an 
all-sufficient reason for his having omitted all description of 
them; yet of new notes and critical remarks about many of them 
there is no lack on all his pages. But if formal descriptions 
