256 ; AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
of attempting to impress such an idea upon the mind of that 
botanist. But now, as to the difficulty of the task which the 
editorship of the New Manual had before them in the case of this 
genus, my friend who did nearly all the original research on eastern 
and middle-western materials of it, will pardon my saying that, 
on account of great length and fullness of his descriptions of the 
new species, I could never hope for leisure to go through them all, 
and choose out the really distinctive characteristics of them; 
and that an editorial tribunal of the manual, itself unpracticed in 
sisyrinchial problems, could accomplish all this, and with even the 
bibliopole aspect of the species question unforgotten, could set the 
seal of approval to 13 species of this genus, almost all of them new, 
and also could “reduce definitely to synonymy” 3 others—all this 
is, under all the adverse conditions, a verdict judicial that, for the 
moment commands my admiration. 
Less wonderful to me is a similar judgment rendered in the case 
of Rubus; for, notwithstanding that the accession of new species 
for this New Manual region, as admitted even by our editors, 
amounts to about twice the whole number ever before recognized 
in any edition, those new specific propositions—there are more 
than two dozen of them—have been presented to the public under 
conditions more than ordinarily favorable to their ultimate approval 
as valid. The very best data for new types are good descriptions; 
they are even better than good specimens, albeit good descriptions 
are perhaps as rare as are the professed taxonomists even who are 
competent to read and understand them. But Dr. Blanchard’s 
descriptions of new brambles, as they have appeared from time 
in Rhodora, have impressed me as most lucid and satisfactory. 
I have adjudged them the most complete and the most intelligible 
diagnoses of new types that have ever been published in New 
England, and have felt that by them alone I might feel assured 
that his species were good, and also that I should be able readily to 
identify them by the diagnosis. 
Here also I may as well remark that despite my having long 
been in rather proud possession of several unsought written en- 
. coniums on my own plant descriptions, some of these from the 
. hands of men no longer with us, but who were of unquestioned 
high rank in macters of phytography, I am still half willing to 
attribute to failure on my part as diagnostician in this instance the 
fact that, out of 6 clear species which I imagined I had clearly con- 
