CERTAIN ASPECTS OF THE SPECIES QUESTION 261 
been given them as new in the interval between two editions of 
Gray’s Manual; and this done, I have been asked why such 
unquestionably good species have not been so much as mentioned 
in the new manual. This experience has been mine in two or three 
different and widely separated states and provinces that lie within 
the limits which the book pretends to cover. 
Over and above the multitude of the teachers and their pupils 
in the schools, there are two classes of what we may call lay botanists 
collectors and amateurs, into whose hands the manuals of botany 
fall. These outsiders, if we may so designate them, are of service 
to the science in many and in different ways; and they are of two 
distinct classes. One class studies nature and observes and com- 
pares plants, each man of them with his own eyes, and forms some 
opinions of his own and does not renounce these opinions for the 
mere reason that several books of descriptive botany set forth 
opposite views. 
The other class distinguishes itself by looking at nature and 
studying plants, as it were only through the eyes of the men who 
have written books. These will seem to hold in such deep veneration 
the newest edition of their chosen manual, that they will force 
Dame Nature herself to conform to the rule and dictum of the 
authorship of that one book. The volume will seem to be regarded 
- as scientifically without spot or blemish, and an absolute finality 
on all questions of the rank of groups, and of the nomenclature of 
them; and if a man of this type should ever engage in a bit of real 
research that would seem to threaten the soundness of a dictum 
of his editorial scientifie lords and masters, he would be likely to 
drop the investigation at the bidding of such authority, lay his 
fingers to his lips and whisper peccavi. 
Each of these types of the lay botanist does useful, even 
admirable work for the science. They explore, singly or collectively 
the native vegetation of a town, a county, or a state; they gather 
rsonal or club or society herbaria, and these are first-class 
repositories of fact, small matter what little book is sworn by in 
matters of classification and naming, whether Robinson and Fer- 
nald's—so very ineptly named "Gray's"—or Britton and Brown. 
And the independent class, they who dare to have ideas of 
their own, and venture to look into nature freely, and fear not the 
botanical dogmatist—these, while their attitude, and theirs alone 
is the really scientific attitude, and the one sure to be the most 
