91 



and intractable in almost hopeless degree. Doctor Gray's pro- 

 longed struggle with the genus gave a result which met the 

 reasonable needs of a generation of botanists and disturbed not 

 their peace of mind. But even Doctor Gray here bowed before 

 his task. To a friend he wrote " If you hear of my breaking 

 down utterly and being sent to an asylum you may lay it to 

 Aster." To such a group of plants has Professor Burgess ad- 

 dressed himself, or, more properly, begun to address himself, in 

 this preliminary volume of 419 pages wherein the two species 

 forming the section Biotia of Doctor Gray's treatment are ex- 

 panded to 81 species, 10 named varieties and about 250 lesser 

 forms. Professor Burgess tells us that his investigations which 

 have led to these results commenced twenty years ago and that 

 the conclusions reached rest in part on field studies continued 

 on the same colonies of plants over periods of as much as seven 

 to ten years. No fault of hastiness, therefore, can be imputed to 

 these conclusions ; and in the general reasoning which leads up to 

 them we have the judgments of a mind long trained as well in 

 outdoors as in indoors botany on many of the questions stirring 

 the present foreground of botanical discussion. 



It is plain in these pages that the author has felt less the 

 motive of completing a monograph than an impelling need, as a 

 student, of rightly understanding, step by step, the objects of his 

 study. A work so completed must perforce carry weight; an 

 upheaval so destructive of long-established tenets, whether its 

 refashioning be right or wrong, will offer to criticism a ready op- 

 portunity. The reproach of " species making " follows close 

 upon an author who proposes any refinement of the grosser con- 

 ceptions of a species which time has imbedded in our text -books 

 and bedecked with a historical aureole. And yet, but for these 

 same " species makers " what misguidance, what untruthfulness 

 would crowd the pages of our manuals? 



Here, in Aster, that old Biotian pair. Aster inacrophyllus and 

 Aster corymbosus, have stumbled along down the annals of our 

 flora somehow upholding honored names but only to be at length 

 revealed as gross masqueraders after all. 



Professor Burgess is not at all subservient to any conventional 



