166 



validity of the genus Megarrhiza may still be seriously defended. 

 The various new species of TrifoUum, Zauschneria, etc., and the 

 recast of Krynitzkia, Plagiobothrys, etc., into new forms may be 

 safely left to the final judgment of competent botanists. Pro- 

 fessor Greene's judgment and ours are widely divergent." 



Long after, when Greene was a professor at the Catholic 

 University of America, he wrote: "It is now more than sixteen 

 years since the first installment was issued of the 'Studies in the 

 Botany of California and Parts Adjacent'; and a retrospect 

 reveals it that these 'Studies' had somewhat more in them of 

 far-reaching consequence than the author of them could have 

 anticipated. This first issue appears to have been the only paper 

 published in our country in the life-time of the then venerable 

 author of the ' Contributions to Botany ' which had the effect of 

 awakening in his mind any serious apprehensions as to the 

 future prevalence in American botany of his own rigidly con- 

 servative taxonomic principles. Away back, almost at the 

 beginning of his career, he had been confronted with innovators, 

 like Rafinesque and Buckley, and had promptly placed their 

 various propositions under the ban of his disapproval, which 

 ban has now been removed, so that these men now live again, in 

 their works, which are found to contain much in the line of 

 actual, and very valuable, contributions to plant taxonomy. So, 

 also, the 'Studies,' while not proclaiming, formally, any new 

 principles, though implying reformatory doctrines in almost 

 every paragraph, were also promptly, but with a gentleness not 

 always characteristic of that author, anathematized. Two 

 years later, however, the ban was completely removed, when 

 the author of the ' Contributions ' adopted precisely the reformed 

 Escholtzia and the reformed Sidalcea of the 'Studies' which 

 he had condemned, and today it will nowhere be questioned that 

 the taxonomic reform now prevailing everywhere amongst us 

 had its initiative in the first number of the ' Studies in the Botany 

 of California and Parts Adjacent.'" 



Greene was one of the last of the old type of self-trained men 

 to attain a high professional position in botany. He entered 

 botany as Nuttall, Torrey and Gray had done before him, with- 



