60 MopERN TREATMENT OF ASTER 
4. Tendency to harsh, or thick, or flabby texture. 
5. Tendency to an inflorescence of larger well-separated heads, 
or if the heads be small, to a corymbosety flat-topped arrangement, 
rather than a panicle. 
But these tendencies, though pervasive, are none of them abso- 
lute, and each finds as remarkable departures from itself within the 
Biotian group as without it. 
I have not recognized this Biotian group as a genus, for it 
grades too imperceptibly into Aster species of the spectabilis group, 
especially in involucre, the chief character by which it had been 
separated. 
The last to recognize this Biotta or Eurybia as a genus was 
Hooker, in his Flora Boreali Americana, 2: 14 (1840), though 
under protest, remarking under his Euryza, ** I follow the learned 
Nees von Esenbeck in the adoption of this and other genera of his 
Asterez, but I must confess that I think the character is much 
too slight, and the difference in habit by no means sufficient 
to warrant such a separation." 
Torrey and Gray made Biotta a formal subgenus under Aster ; 
and Hoffmann in Engler and Prantl’s Pfanzenfamilien, 1894, so 
continued it, but as a section* rather than a formal subgenus. - 
I have not entitled the Biotian group as a subgenus, deeming 
formal subgenera of doubtful utility. If the distinction is sharp 
enough to require organization into a formal subgenus, why not 
constitute it as a genus at once as the more direct and simple 
treatment? It is in vain to hope to make all genera the expres- 
sion of an exactly equal rank ; their degrees of difference can never 
be exactly alike throughout a family. 
Treating the Biotian Asters as an informal group or section, 
z. e., without technical name in Latin form, I retain the use, in that 
sense, as an appellative of the name now almost 70 years famil- 
iarly and happily associated with them, which would be compul- 
sorily replaced if the Biotian Asters were erected into a genus, 
Biotia as a genus-name having been invalidated by its earlier use 
by Cassini. 
* His second section, consisting of ** A. corymbosus” and ** A. macrophyllus” ; pre- 
ceded by his first section, aiite consisting of a single species, Gray's poo 
astrum Shastensis, from Cal 
DUE aa A E NOT 
joo tios ale C Res A 
deos Te AA 
