Uren Pel ieks. 
NEW SPECIES. 
To the Editors of the Botanical Gazette :—Your editorial on ‘‘ New Spe- 
cies,’ in the April number, emphasizes a line of thought that kept me for 
many years from publishing any of the undescribed forms of fungi that came 
to my notice. It seemed presumptuous for an isolated worker, having access 
to but few books or authentic specimens, to attempt to describe new species 
in groups where the literature and synonymy were in such confusion that the 
best equipped mycologist could seemingly only flounder in the mire 
Farther reflection, and the problems encountered in attempting the study 
of our southern mycological flora, in which so large a proportion of the forms 
observed are evidently undescribed, have led me to change my views. You 
say that in former days “classification was confessedly artificial, the purpose 
being little more than a convenient cataloguing of forms.’’ Very good, and 
I would add that in these lower groups the condition you describe still exists, 
and until we get a fairly complete “convenient catalogue”’ I see no alterna- 
tive but to continue making ‘‘new species’’ of such discovered forms as seem 
to be undescribed. No one appreciates more fully than the makers of these 
species that their work is only tentative ; but how are we to base a classifica- 
tion “upon genetic relationships as indicated by a careful study of morphol- 
ogy’’ until we at least know of the existence of the forms that are to be 
classified ; and how is this knowledge to be obtained unless each observer 
makes a permanent record of the new forms he discovers ? 
I have come to quite agree with the views of a brilliant young zoologist 
and botanist, one of the few who in recent years have made a reputation in 
both fields, when he expressed the thought that it was not the occasional 
renaming of old species and the consequent multiplication of synonyms that 
produced serious confusion in nomenclature. When such new names are 
accompanied by sufficient and carefully drawn descriptions they do but little 
harm. It is the publishing of names with slovenly and unrecognizable 
descriptions, and the carelessly erroneous reference of new forms to old 
species that have caused an almost hopeless condition of chaos in some of 
these lower groups. 
When a reasonably complete number of the forms that actually occur in 
nature of parasitic fungi and other low plants have been collected, named, 
[yuLy 
