36 INTRODUCTION. 
them intelligible to other botanists, without the aid of portrait 
figures or selected specimens. To such an excess has this practice 
been carried of late, that we now find in print long and worthless 
descriptions, miscalled specific, made only from a single individual 
plant, or even from a fragment of an individual plant,—say, from 
a single fern frond or from the dried twig of a rose-briar or 
bramble-bush. It would be about as wise to describe an individual 
Hottentot or Eskimo, a Tom Thumb or a Daniel Lambert, a one- 
legged Donato or a three-legged Baby, as a species distinct from 
the fair-skinned and two-legged Homo sapiens (Linn.) of medium 
size. 
As the result of all this ingenuity in rightly or wrongly dividing 
and subdividing species, originally so considered and still retained 
as such by at least some botanists of authority, we have now 
various ‘ grades of species ’ in Floras and other works of descriptive 
botany. The conventional expression “rank of species” means 
wide inequality of rank in its actual application to plants; for 
there is truly no equality among book species, but instead many 
grades of them. Some botanists of high authority will keep up 
an original aggregate species, or will even combine two or more 
such species into one; while others divide the original into two 
segregates ; others again making three segregates out of it; and 
still others going on to four, five, six, or any greater number of 
segregated sub-species,—occasionally, as in Rubus fruticosus (Linn.), 
even a score or a hundred sub-species,—all carved out of the 
formerly supposed single species. And much more troublesome 
than this, through the illogical methods in re-naming before 
adverted to, we too often find the same specific name now applied 
to quite different things, that is, applied alike 10 combinations and 
separations which are themselves widely unequal and variable. 
Without attempting to define all the various grades possible, we 
may place plants under three ranks or categories which have been 
conveniently designated “ Super-species, Ver-species, Sub-species.” 
The first work on British plants in which these terms have been 
adopted and practically carricd out, is Mr. Boswell Syme’s Third 
Edition of ‘English Botany.’ The Super-species are those originally 
