190 - AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
tenfold more work on Colorado botany than my friend Pro- 
fessor Porter had done. With the exception of eight or ten 
new species which had been gathered in southwestern parts 
of the Territory unvisited by me, most of the plants enumer- 
ated in the book were more familiar to me than to the author 
of the book, or to any other, for I had now devoted four years 
rather continuously to the study of this field, and had de- 
tected many plants which had not been found there by any of 
my more transient predecessors. These results of my re- 
searches, asked for by Professor Porter, found special men- 
tion by him in his Preface. 
During eleven years next succeeding the appearance of 
this first Colorado Flora, I had traversed much of Colorado, 
Wyoming, California, Arizona and New Mexico. Within this 
period I had acquired a fuller knowledge of far western botany 
than had ever before been gained by an individual botanist; 
and the abundant new facts gathered, in as far as published 
at all, had been published in the main by Asa Gray; this also 
not so much by sending him new types as by indicating the 
characters of species already long in his possession, but, 
wrongly placed by him because of his failure to see the char- 
acters. 
I shall never be chargeable with having been premature in 
making my beginnings at authorship on Rocky Mountain bot- 
any. To the study of this flora and other more or less related 
floras, to the eastward, westward and southward of it, I had 
devoted sixteen years; and a very considerable part of the 
knowledge gained so laboriously and devotedly, I had given 
to another to publish as his own. I was already 42 years old 
and more, when, in 1885, I published my own first paragraph 
of new Colorado botany. 
Coetaneously with this little event, there came forth from 
the press a volume with the large title of a “Manual of Rocky 
Mountain Botany.” Its author, in his Preface, commendably 
disclaimed any particular knowledge of the region named. 
grape 
and it found A place on my library shelves. This was a quar- 
ter century since; and, though during the whole of this period 
I have wrought more than any other upon Rocky Mountain 
_ botany, I doubt if I have consulted the a half dozen times. 
For the real student of that flora there was nothing in it. 
