- 
CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE SPECIES QUESTION 253 
Lonicera -8 9 15 
Panicum 19 23 83 
Paspalum 2 8 at 
Potentilla 9 14 21 
Rubus IO II 38 
Scirpus 14 17 35 
Senecio 8 18 
Sisyrinchium 1 2 13 
Solidago 32 42 56 
Vernonia 2 6 8 
i 17 7 45 
Perhaps a selection of figures statistical like the above does 
of itself sufficiently emphasize the failure I had intimated; the 
the manifest inability of the aforesaid editorial people to suppress 
the swarming multitude of recent botanical species. To suppress 
such by the hundred would have seemed the bounden duty of 
new editors in view of their having chosen—perhaps by forceful 
considerations having been constrained to use— the name of that 
great conservative who was so intolerant of species and species- 
makers. I am confident that the author of the first Gray’s Manual 
could he have had in dream or vision of the night a view of the 
three columns of figures written above, realizing that those of the 
right-hand column were exactly prophetic—a real enumeration 
of the species that were to be admitted in a book of the not distant 
future and to be audaciously named “New Gray’s Manual"— 
not only would he have arisen from such a vision in a rage; he 
might have lived thereafter to his life's end in dismal apprehension 
of a reincarnate Rafinesque, coming with power to beget 
speedily a numerous and full-grown progeny 
It must not be assumed by the reader that the genera cited 
are in all cases indicative of sudden increase by accession of so 
many new species. Zieracium, for example, had in 1848 6 species, 
all native; and the 3 more that find place in the book of 1889 
are all Old World species that had added themselves to our flora 
by naturalization. Also the increase from 9 in 1889 to 17 in 1908 
is mainly attributable to the same cause; for now 7 out of the 17 
species are introduced, 1 only having been added to the aggregate 
of species as new. Carduus, or Cirsium, or by whatever name you 
call the genus of the thistles, as well as Galium and Senecio have 
of late been more or less notably increased in the number of their 
