BOTANY: W. TRELEASE 
627 
My feeling has been that the only way to unravel the difficulties was to 
begin with the study of types of the earlier species, passing to those of 
later date and deferring examination of unauthentic collections until the 
end. Though it was not possible to carry this plan out in all detail, it 
has been my privilege to see most of the types of tropical American spe- 
cies, and to photograph in natural size representative parts of them 
whenever found, so that whatever errors may have slipped in, they 
scarcely include a misapprehension as to what is meant by the earlier 
used names except for one or two of Nee's species of which no identi- 
fiable material is known to remain. 
It was not until this study of the forms that occur to the south of us 
had been essentially finished, that it seemed best to include in my 
treatment those of the United States. These have been so long and so 
repeatedly studied and for the most part figured that little would seem 
to have been left undone with them. Yet within the year Professor 
Sargent has pointed out a serious misapprehension as to the proper 
Latin names of the rock chestnut oak and the cow oak, and has made 
it very questionable whether what we know as red oak in the northern 
States is what Linnaeus called Quercus rubra. As I finish my manu- 
script, in which for completeness the northern oaks are included sum- 
marily, I have a feeling that more uncertainty still attends several of 
these polymorphic species than perhaps any one which occurs in the 
tropics; and unfortunately this uncertainty for the most part cannot be 
removed by reference to types, which do not exist for the most puzzling 
of these northern species. 
A careful analysis of the characters presented by wood, inflorescence 
and flowers leads me to beheve that the Fagaceae are far from being the 
primitive plants that they are commonly taken for, and I am disposed 
to conclude that their affinities are with such seemingly advanced and 
certainly specialized but still really simple orders as the Ranunculales 
and Rosales, from the type of which they have receded. 
On this continent, the oaks (excluding Pasania as a distinctly sepa- 
rable genus) seem to fall into three subgenera or main groups instead of 
two as usually understood, Leucobalanus, the white oaks, typical of 
Quercus; Erythrobalanus, the red or black oaks; and Protobalanus, a 
more ancient type as I conceive it, comprising the protean intermediate 
assemblage clustering about Q. chrysolepis. 
Summarized, my study of American materials contained in the prin- 
cipal herbaria of the world leads to the recognition of 354 species, of 
which 158, or very nearly one-half, are described as new in the manu- 
script which I am now prepared to submit to the Academy for publi- 
