74 AMERICAN FERN JOURNAL 
once more exemplifying the wholly unsatisfactory and 
entirely indefensible method of adopting the herbarium 
specimens of older authors as types when said authors 
did not so consider them. The writer hasn’t much 
sympathy with the modern custom of making a dried 
specimen, in most instances only a fragment of a plant, 
a specific type. Herbarium specimens are too notori- 
ously unreliable. They may be destroyed, mutilated, 
lost, interchanged, mislabeled, and, except in the case 
of very small herbaceous species, do not give one the 
slightest conception of the habit of the species; again 
in the distribution of exsiccatae two or more species 
are frequently sent out under the same number and 
name and consequently the co-type may not always be 
the same as the type. Descriptions are the real’ types 
and herbarium specimens, like plates, are but illustra- 
tions of the species and sometimes, for one or another 
of the above named causes, are only a means to added 
confusion. The transfer of name was made because of 
the discovery in the Herbarium of the Missouri Botan 
ical Garden of a so-called co-type of Equisetum laeviga- 
tum Braun which proves to be the Equisetum hyemale 
var. intermedium of A. A. Eaton. It seemed rather 
peculiar to me that Engelman, who supplied the mater- 
ial for the description and who as translator and editor 
of Braun’s MSS. is the sponsor, in a measure, of the 
species, should have so misunderstood his own specles 
as to have misapplied it and to have permitted such 
misapplication in our manuals without having cal 
the attention of their authors thereto. A careful study 
of the original description will show that Braun’s speci® 
has not been misunderstood, that his description applies 
to the annual-stemmed plant that has been passing under 
Braun’s name. It is true that Braun thought 2. lar 
gatum to be a perennial-stemmed species, but at a 
time all American species of this group were 50 ec 
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