BUBANI’S FLORA PYRENAEA 53 
notes on these will be read mostly by botanists who never saw the 
work; perhaps never before heard the name of it. 
I have said before that science hails with something like joy 
the book of science that is original, and in which an independently 
thoughtful mind has expressed itself without hesitation; but I 
have not said that men of science welcome always such books; 
and I am far from being alone in the observation that men of science 
may themselves be the most effectual hindrance to the advance- 
ment of science. Botanists in multitudes, and in every century, 
have their pet theories and their idol principles, their faith in which 
is implicit and firm, and to which they seem to have sworn such 
eternal allegiance that, when the new man comes along, the strong 
and fearless iconoclast, and laughs to scorn their idolatry, he must 
simply be ignored. It must not be noised abroad that he is here. 
Thus has it become notorious in the history of our science that 
the books that were most surely destined to accomplish great things 
for its advancement, in the day of their publication fell from the 
press as still born, and remained unnoticed for the space of a 
generation or two, or three. Such were the immortal treatises 
of Cesalpinus, of Adanson, of Lamarck, and of Salisbury besides 
those of many a man of lesser note than they. 
It is of good augury, this fact that so great a work as Bu- 
baai’s Flora Pyrenaea, though ten years published, is still almost 
unknown. It may have been reviewed in several journals of botany 
published in Latin Europe which I have not seen; but that I 
doubt; and I have looked in vain these last ten years in British 
and American journals for a word of mention of this treatise. 
Also I am confident that this silence is not everywhere that of 
ignorance as to the very existence of such a Flora. I know oi several 
American botanists who have put themselves in possession of this 
work; and not one of these several ever heard of the treatise 
except through me; and I probably should not have known of 
its existence had not the publishers of it in Italy sent me their 
printed circular announcing it. 
This silence, I repeat it, seems to me omnious; for no botanist 
competent to read Bubani, can peer into any one of the volumes 
at any page, and fail to see that it is a work of most extraordinary 
quality in other respects besides its amazing erudition. But botan- 
ical nomenclature is therein treated as if there had not been in the 
