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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 292. 



lectors ought to realize that by freely sup- 

 plying the material within their reach they 

 confer a favor not so much to the particular 

 center that receives it as upon all future 

 workers in that field who look to that 

 center as the proper repository of the ma- 

 terial they need to carry on their researches. 

 The most obscure field collector by concen- 

 tration of observation rather than by dif- 

 fusion of effort may add material that will 

 be of vital importance to a correct and com- 

 plete knowledge of our flora. More and 

 more these field workers must be content to 

 wait for results and not be clamorous for 

 their material to be named by the next 

 mail, resting assured that the material they 

 contribute will receive due recognition on 

 the final results and that none of their 

 work that is really useful will go to waste ; 

 on the other hand the specialist taking his 

 material in order will gain time for his 

 final revision that would otherwise be 

 badly broken up in miscellaneous exami- 

 nations and too often marred by hasty de- 

 terminations and conclusions. 



The different attitude of people toward 

 the botanist and toward certain of the 

 scientific workers in fields where there is a 

 much more decided commercial phase to 

 the science, resulting in part from the fact 

 that real botanists are such because they are 

 first lovers of their subject, is well illustrated 

 in this matter of the freedom with which 

 material is sent to botanists for examina- 

 tion and report. Fancy a man sending to a 

 well known chemist a half dozen samples of 

 water for chemical analysis with the assur- 

 ance that if any of the water is not used up 

 in the process, the chemist may have it for 

 his trouble! ! And yet no one thinks of any- 

 thing else in sending a botanist from a half 

 dozen to two hundred specimens in a bale 

 with the information that he would like 

 them named and the specimens need not be 

 returned. To do this correctly involves 

 skill that requires fully as great an amount 



of scientific preparation and often more ex- 

 penditure of time than to make a similar 

 number of water analyses, yet to the botan- 

 ist the idea of pay has not been presented. 

 While it is true that by this self-sacrifice 

 many of our great collections have been en- 

 riched with valuable material, and many 

 solitary workers have been encouraged to 

 better things, it is also true that it has been 

 accomplished with an immense waste of 

 time and nervous energy that ought not to 

 be too lightly demanded of active workers. 

 And this labor is all the more exasperating 

 when some botanical worker who does not 

 appreciate the necessity of abundance of 

 good material brings in from some distant 

 region merely a series of odds and ends of 

 fragments that are yet suflBcient to show 

 that something really worth having might 

 have been collected by a little expenditure 

 of common sense and foresight on the part 

 of the collector. 



3. There are some practices rife even 

 among those from whom we naturally ex- 

 pect better things which ought in some way 

 to be put under the ban. I need only men- 

 tion the practice of literary revisions of 

 genera with no commensurate study or 

 even knowledge of the plants themselves ; 

 the so called galvanic method of transfer- 

 ring species heterogeneously from one 

 generic group to another except in definite 

 monographic work ; and the description of 

 species in check -lists, fly-leaves, circulars, 

 and other out-of-the-way places where they 

 are not readily accessible to the general 

 botanist. In short the closing years of the 

 nineteenth century ought to sound the 

 death knell of the literary enthusiast and 

 the galvanizer and mark the disappearance 

 of the grotesque and the rafinesque from 

 American botany. 



4. The extent of territory covered by the 

 American Flora is on the eve of a remark- 

 able expansion. The political events of the 

 past few years are in part responsible for 



