2O 



botany and zoology ; these at least will be departments which as 

 much if not more than any other it will be necessary to have filled, 

 if the proposed institution is to have any rank at all, or to be in any 

 respect up to the standard of other colleges, universities or schools 

 of science. Make the institution as practical as you please, lower 

 its grade to the last conceivable degree, still the great fact cannot 

 be got over that something has to be taught there ; that there must 

 be some course of study, and that whether you simplify or complicate 

 the programme, the already mentioned branches will be. the last to 

 be omitted from it. 



Now I state what I know to be a fact, when' I assert that no 

 one of the branches in question can be taught in any other than the 

 most superficial way until the results of our Survey are in the hands 

 of the teachers. This statement I will illustrate by reference to our 

 botanical work, as this may probably be better understood by the 

 people generally than any of the other' departments mentioned. It 

 will probably be admitted by all that it would be absolutely neces 

 sary for the teacher of botany, in order to impart to the student any 

 thing more than the merest rudiments of the science, to know the 

 names and position in the system of the plants which grow in his 

 vicinity, and which he would collect and use for illustration of his 

 teachings, and which his pupils would bring to him for that purpose. 

 This knowledge, however, is an impossibility at present ; there is no 

 botanist in the State who can name the plants he collects, nor is 

 there any one person elsewhere who can do it for him. 



The facts are simply these : During the last seventy years, more 

 than one hundred and twenty professional botanists and collectors 

 have visited parts of the regions west of the Rocky Mountains, and 

 more than seventy of them have traveled in California. Their col 

 lections have gone into the various herbaria of this country and of 

 Europe, and the printed data relating to them are scattered through 

 an immense number of volumes ; so that if any one were to begin 

 and make a complete collection of them, it would require years of 

 labor and thousands of dollars expenditure, and, even with the most 

 strenuous exertions, it would be impossible to make the list complete. 

 But if this could be done, and this library could be transferred to 

 the Pacific coast and placed in their possession, our botanists would 

 still be unable to give correct names to their specimens. And for 

 these reasons : not unfrequently several collectors have obtained the 

 same species in different localities and seasons and in varying forms ; 

 specimens thus collected have been referred to different botanists for 



