«e e 
258 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
which to ensure truly scientific results. Very possibly a spirit of 
 unalloyed sincerity has ruled the revision of the Cyperaceae; for 
here, for the whole family, a very large one, rich in species by Amer- 
ican authors of the early and the middle periods of the nineteenth 
century, the editor has put forward but 10 new ones of his own 
specific propositions, and has suppressed only some 25 that have 
been proposed by other authors of his own time. 
The statistics of Crataegus, as I have given them above, 
appear startling; for we who have had too much else to do all the 
while have heard all sorts of tales about superlative species making 
in this genus, and all within the last ten years. The figures show 
for the new manual, only a six-fold increase in the number of 
Crataegus species since 1889; and Antennaria, a genus which has 
been much less talked about, has increased in the number of 
admitted species more than tenfold. But then, of the ro species 
which in the new book are added to the one which was in the older 
books 7 are mine; the other 3 also appeared for admission later, 
and as under my immediate discipleship, and but for my having 
shown where the characters for antennaria species are to be found, 
it is scarcely probable that the book of 1908 would have differed 
from its predecessors as to membership of Antennaria for the 
Manual territory. But there was with me a limit to the possibilities 
of antennaria expansion; a limit set by nature, apparently; for . 
I believe I did not discover and publish, for the whole of Nor 
America, to exceed 35, or at most, 40 species. How very different 
the history of Crataegus within the same recent period. I have 
been assured by one who has had some part in the investigation 
of that genus that' about 1000 American species have now been. 
published; even the greatest proportion of them haling from the 
United States and Canada. “It appears that about 600 species 
had been added to the genus for the Gray's Manual region at 
about the time of the issue of the 1908 edition. And so, inasmuch 
as said edition has but 55 species over and above the 10 species 
_ of the issue next preceding, the 600 proposed new ones have been 
brought down by the suppressive skill of the editorship to the 
i remarkably small number of 55. "Then again making a canvass 
of the Crataegus pages of the manual ia quest of such of the new 
. Ones as the editorship has been able to “reduce definitely to 
ynonymy,’’ if no error has been made in the counting, the co- 
ence is curious, that these also number 55; and we have now, 
