252 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
aggerated form, as well as under conditions much less favorable to a 
dogmatic and imperious solution of the problem than those which 
had existed sixty years before. The first editorship had been vested 
in a single individual, a man already of reputation, and that also 
well earned, in his chosen field, gifted with insight and in his 
laying siege to species CEN favored by circumstances. Of 
his elders and ‘his contemporaries who had published so many 
species, almost all had disappeared from the field; some as having 
een claimed by death, others as having abandoned botany. 
He was even a professional botanist more than his predecessors, 
and occupied a seat of authority Everything conspired to warrant 
his assuming, for North America, the imperium of the science. It 
required no great degree of courage to assume it; and his imperium 
was long a success. His task was easy. There was not at the time, 
a journal of botany in existence, nor any danger from open criticism 
or protest. Of those expensive abstractions, species, he suppressed 
as many as he would, and then for almost forty years, enjoyed the 
remunerative and the peaceable fruits of his early conquest. 
How, and by what forces, this imperium came to an end need. not 
here be told. The important fact is that it had ended a full decade 
of years before the latest issue of Gray's Manual was undertaken; 
and species had multiplied amazingly beyond all that any one 
forty years earlier could have dreamed; and the editing of the new 
manual involved difficulties impossible to have been anticipated. 
With what indifferent results compared with those reached sixty 
years before, the new editorship has met the species question, 
may be intimated by presenting again a column of sample genera; 
a list of generic names in good part the same as that given above, 
but showing figures for the three editions of the Manual, the first, 
the middle edition and the latest. 
1848 1889 1908 
Antennaria |i ia II 
IO ; 8 15 
7 IO 65 
13 16 I9 
10 13 25 
6 9 17 
5 6 TE 
20 2 44 
