CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE SPECIES QUESTION 259 
as named and accounted for in one way or another, the sum of 
110 of 600 published new ones, while the "few" which remain 
totally without mention are 490. Considering the hundreds 
of genera treated in the volume, and the very great number of 
them in which new species have been published within ten years, 
and noting as we do many large genera in this flora, to some of 
which decades and even scores of species have been contributed 
within a dozen years, besides a much greater of small genera which 
have been thus augmented in the same proportion, in the aggregate 
of which only here and there a newly added species has met wi 
any mention in the book, it may be inferred almost to a certainty 
that a total of a thousand or more of this sort exist; and a thousand 
can not be called “a few." The botanical public may claim a 
right to more well considered and fairer statements than this and 
others which seem to have been thrust into this Preface without 
reflection, and, I dare add, without conscience. In order to show 
warrant for so severe a statement as this, and at,the same time to 
impress more deeply the truthfulness of it, I go back to Crataegus; 
: and in resuming the thread of former discourse upon it I shall 
first confess to have taken something like self-gratulatory satis- 
faction in following the extraordinary increase of late years in the 
proposed species of this genus. Me, to whom aforetime all the mak- 
ing of superfluous new species was attributed—me have the several 
specialists in Crataegus so far outstripped, that I am left almost an 
extreme conservative, in peril of coming to be called a “ moss- 
back.” What aré-my two score antennarias and three score 
violets—all of them herbs, and of plastic and mutable nature and 
temperament—what are these few scores of my species here, com- 
pared with 600 new species in one genus of trees, all on the same 
extent of territory? And it is a genus not only of trees, but of slow 
growth and slow and scanty multiplication of individuals; a genus 
in which the evolution of distinct types must proceed with incal- 
ulable slowness in comparison with such things as violets, the 
individuals of which may be presumed to multiply a million a 
year to one of crataegus. I suggest to my friends of the Chicago 
Symposium that they cease from quoting the Jordans and Gando- 
gers of Europe for their illustrations of excessive species making. 
The plant they call Draba verna inhabits almost all temperate 
Eurasia and America, flowering in untold millions of new individals 
every year, in multitudinous diversities of soil and climate; and 60 
