192 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
is both longer and broader. But we shall make a more fair 
comparison—at least a more significant one—by taking a 
census of the pages. The volume of the small territory has 
about 410 pages, that of the thrice larger, about 610. This, 
in view of the fact that in the book for the one state there 
are no descriptions, while in that covering almost four states 
as large, there are full diagnoses, is a contrast almost amazing; 
for, we who know well how speedily and multifariously en- 
vironments change throughout the whole Rocky Mountain re- 
gion, understand well that an honest flora of all Colorado, 
Wyoming and Montana, plus half of New Mexico and Utah, 
must embrace, if not twice as many plants as Colorado alone, 
at the very lowest possible estimate, one-third as many more. 
At this point we may take the testimony of each author him- 
self as to the phytologic contents of the two fields so vastly 
unequal in extent. For Colorado alone, Dr. Rydberg enumer- 
ates 2,912 species; for the three of four times greater area, 
Dr. Nelson lists only 2,733 species; admitting, however, as by 
way of accounting for this astounding discrepancy that, of other 
—andwe add, older and more experienced—authors’ species he 
has reduced 1,788. These large reductions to synonymy include 
species by even that most conservative of American botanists, 
Asa Gray; also according to an estimate of my own, some- 
what less than 400 species of Dr. Rydberg, whom I hear peo- 
in mediaeval Latin nomenclature, they called filius ante pat- 
rem. Such almost wholesale suppression of other men's con- 
tributions to Rocky Mountain botany will seem at first thought 
hard to excuse or condone; perhaps the more difficult after one 
has noted that the very few Coulterian as well as the multi- 
tudinous Nelsonian species are commonly maintained as valid. 
I doubt very much that any botanical community on either 
side of the Atlantic will be found to be of the opinion that 
Dr. Rydberg and I are the reckless species makers, and that 
Dr. Nelson is the careful, cautious and discrete conservative. 
I, who have noted the very beginnings of the botanical career 
of each man now active in North American botany, have no 
such opinion of my friend in Wyoming, nor, as I said, do I be- 
lieve y exists anywhere. 
2105. pl a quarter-century into the past, ane to a 
_ time when only one name of botanist now active in Roc 
Mountain 
ky 
in botany had yet been heard, we shall find that we 
