248 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
scheme, will have to apply the process to his own work, provided 
such general suppression of recent species be taken in hand. 
I have been more explicit than I had intended to be in open 
animadversion on this aspect of the species question; but I saw 
the desirability of calling forth this strange suggestion from its 
lurking place in the symposium report, and setting it before another 
class of readers for their enlightenment as to what curious things 
are being thought and spoken in relation to species; and no one, 
I think, will have the hardihood to undertake the defense of those 
propositions as even remotely verging toward the scientific. 
Probably nothing more dogmatic and arbitrary ever before found 
A aa and at the same time was let pass uncriticized, in a 
symposium of men professedly scientific. 
I m already referred to this unscientific outlook on the 
species question as the industrial one. Possibly it may prove 
susceptible of a more definitive or diagnostic name. Let us see. 
I do not recall that the scheme of arithmetic species-reduction 
had advocacy in the symposium save on the part of such as are 
known to be individually interested in copyrights on books of 
descriptive botany; and this is in all probability more than a mere 
coincidence; any way, I have long seemed to see that there is often 
taken, however disguisedly, what I will designate now as the 
are Aspect of the Species Question. 
It is evident that if good profits are to accrue from botanical 
manual copyright, two conditions must be met. The book must 
profess to cover an area of well peopled territory sufficient to 
invite many purchasers. Then the cost of the printing must 
be so incondiderable that the book may be offered at a moderate 
price. Of course the expense of publication is determined by the 
number of pages printed; and so one, and perhaps the most 
inexorable, of the conditions of a volume of descriptive botany that 
is to pay generously will be that the number of species to be 
described be reduced to a low figure. The smaller the number 
of species the less the cost of printing and the more lucrative the 
investment, so long as the extent of territory embraced, and 
thereby the prospective large sales, remain the same. 
By way of illustrating how a single genus, according to the 
treatment given it, may increase or lessen at once the cost of 
_ printing a manual, and the profits on copyright in it, let us con- 
> o. pe It is well known that, by recent ittvestigation 
