74 
siderable sifting and digesting. The third reason has been that 
he has not felt himself a good enough phytogeographer to under- 
take it. Furthermore, the sketches that are extant, dealing 
with the flora of the Rocky Mountains, are not writen by phyto- 
geographers. Brandegee, Porter, Parry, Watson, Greene, A. 
Nelson, M. E. Jones, and myself were, or are, mainly taxono- 
mists, Fremont an explorer, Tweedy a surveyor and botanical 
collector, Merriam a zoólogist, Leiberg, Ensign and Sudworth 
forestry men, Cockerell an entomologist and general scientist, 
Clements and Ramaley ecologists, etc. It was, therefore, by no 
means an easy task to give a phytogeographical sketch of the 
Rocky Mountain region. In the writer's opinion, Professor 
Harshberger has not succeeded very well in this respect, not even 
as well as might be expected. How he has succeeded in sketching 
the vegetation of other parts of our country, I can not tell, as I 
have too little knowledge thereof to venture to express any 
opinion. The main reason why he did not succeed so well, 
was because he had very little personal knowledge of the Rockies, 
but I think that it depended also upon the fact that our phyto- 
geographers, and ecologists also, do not in general realize the 
importance of the relationship between phytogeography on one 
side and taxonomy and other branches of science on the other. 
It is not necessary that a good phytogeographer should be a 
good phytographer—he need not have described a single species 
of plant; neither that he should be a good systematist—he 
need not have studied the systematic relationship of a single group 
of plants; but it is important that he should be a fairly good 
general taxonomist, so as to know the plants he is dealing with. 
When a person is, by circumstances, practically confined to 
compilation, it is still more important that he should know the 
species credited to a certain region, in order to be able to sift 
judiciously the records. In the list of trees and shrubs of the 
Black Hills are enumerated by Harshberger: Chimaphila umbel- 
lata, Cornus canadensis and Linnaea borealis (should have been 
L. americana). Either by ignorance or by carelessness these 
have been included among trees and shrubs. Cornus canadensis 
is less shrubby than our strawberries, for the rhizome, the only 
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