78 MopERN TREATMENT OF ASTER 
Oakes in the same region ; A. zzraiZis,* since not rediscovered, was 
collected by Professor L. R. Gibbes in 1835, near Columbia, S. C. 
One of the zealous seekers for the Asters in this period was 
Wm. Boott,t an acute student of the flora of eastern Massachu- 
setts, who was so fortunate as to secure a copy of Nees’ Genera 
Asterearum, later passing as a part of Boott's botanical library, to 
the library of the Gray Herbarium. As the result of these studies, 
plants still exist in the Torrey herbarium, which had been referred 
by Dr. Torrey to Mr. Boott for identification, and bear the names 
given by him, 1836 or later, after receiving De Candolle's modi- 
fication of Nees’ Asters ; including his Bzotza macrophylla and his 
Diotia Schreberi, which seem to be the plants Nees intended ; and 
his Szotia glomerata, which was a less successful venture, the 
specimen being a young and therefore subsessile plant of A. mac- 
rophyllus, which would not have remained glomerate at maturity, 
and which presented longer and differently-shaped leaves from 
those Nees’ description called for. 
Later than the effort of Wm. Boott no other serious attempt 
to identify all the European descriptions of Biotian Asters is 
known to me, prior to my undertaking it at Washington in 1886. 
The interval was broken by the active collecting by Shuttle- 
worth in Pennsylvania; and by the discovery by E. W. Hervey in 
Massachusetts of the species named for him by Gray. 
Perhaps many other Biotian forms would have been recorded 
during the half century, 1836-1886, had it not been for the extra- 
ordinary dictum of Torrey and Gray's Flora, in 1843, that “ there 
are certainly but two species of Biotia indigenous to the United 
States." Although giving in most respects an excellent descrip- 
ii On the doubtful line between the Aiotian and Spectabilis groups. 
illiam Boott, 1805-1 ; born in Boston, lived later in Medford, Mass.; 
studied at Exeter Academy and at Harvard ; stadied medicine at Dublin and Paris; 
soon returning to America, turned to botany, doing special work on Isoetes, the 
Grasses, and certain tribes of the Cyperaceæ. His only written work was ‘‘a shor 
oe paper" mm in assistance of his brother.—Asa Gray in Am. Jour. Sci. 
III. 35: 262. Wm. Boott was youngest brother of the well-known specialist on Carex, 
Dr. ipn Boott, oras of London, but born in Boston, and in 1816, 
Tuckerman, an explorer of Mt. inary and its flora, the southeastern arm of that 
resins Boott’s Spur, bearing his na Their cousin, Francis Boott the composer, 
of Cambridge, Mass., continued the family name in America lli his death, 1904, at the 
npe. age of 9I. —Zr. B. L. Robin 
