WesterIt buckthoens 63 



may be permitted to question. Certainly also, the inexperienced, 

 if they will, may make phrases in laudation of inexperience. 



What a certain one of the reyiewer's " great European syste- 

 matists" has had to say respecting the CampanulaceEe and 

 Cichoriacese as allied, I have read. The reading does not take 

 long ; and the writing would seem to have been that of a man 

 who had not himself made any study of the plants themselves 

 from this point of view ; even whose reading of what the fore- 

 fathers, Jussieu, De CandoUe, Lindley and Bentham have said, 

 had been but partial, and cursory at that ; such a perusal as 

 neither deeply instructed him, nor at all deterred him from 

 assigning the Cichoriaceffi a place which, although I dare say 

 he knew it not, is jiist that given them two hundred years ago 

 by the authorities of that period, Tournefort, Eay, Haller and 

 others. 



We have no great American systematists. But there is hope 

 in our future, so long as we have two or three who, like the late 

 Dr. Porter and the living authors of the most complete and 

 valued manuals of East American botany, dare dissent from 

 what I am wont to think of as German artificialism, in so far 

 as to locate the Cichoriaceae where nature indicates that they 

 belong. 



Some Western Buckthorns. 



Rhamijus easciculata. Shrub with very stout and rigid 

 branches dark-colored, glabrous after the first season, the grow- 

 ing ones pubescent; densely leafy and the foliage of the smallest, 

 deciduous though perhaps tardily so: leaves obovate-oblong, 

 oblong and elliptical, the smaller i inch long, the largest li 

 inches, obtuse or acutish, firmly and rather sharply serrulate, 

 green above, yellowish beneath, sparsely pubescent on both faces, 

 the hairs spreading and hirtellous, especially along the midvein 

 beneath : flowers not seen : fruit small, 3-seeded. 



White Mountains, ISTew Mexico, 25 July, 1897, E. 0. Wooton, 

 allied to H. Smitnii. 



Ehamnxts uksina. Eigid shrub with many divergent bran- 

 ches and rather loosely leafy, deciduous, the growing branches 

 and the leaves beneath whitish with a minute and dense tomen- 



