MULTIPLICATION OF SPECIES 467 
* Many specimens,' he exclaims to Bentham, when he finds 
two of his new New Zealand species are old Tasmanian ones 
(July 30, 1856), * always break down characters,' and he avows, 
* it is a bad sign of genus when it is extremely difficult to refer 
new species to any of the others.' (February 5, 1852.) 
Long before he impressed the fact on Darwin (p. 457) 
he was well aware that those who deal with an incomplete 
flora or a small number of specimens are apt to define isolated 
varieties as so many new species. Accordingly, to arrive at 
trustworthy fact, these irregular results of the ' personal 
equation ' among describers must be regularised, at whatever 
cost of labour in examining new or re-examining old material, 
and so he groans at discovering in the work of a voluminous 
botanist ' an unfathomable gulf between him and right under- 
standing.' 
A few examples may be given of his dealing with the 
excessive multiplication of species and the consequent over- 
lapping and confusion. 
On September 24, 1851, just when the last boxes of his 
Indian collections have arrived, he tells Bentham : 
Klotzsch [then in Berhn] offers to make a frightful 
mess of the Khododendrons, cutting the genus into 20 and 
placing varieties of one species into two or more genera, 
and aUied species into each throughout ; it is dreadful ; 
he wants me to be partner in his crimes. 
Three months later he describes himself as * swimming in 
synonymy,' and on March 20, 1852, writes to Harvey : 
What a glorious Grass-man Munro is ; he reduces my 
father's Herb, to about 1600 species ! I quite expected 
they would come down to 2000. 
Six days later : 
Munro has named nearly all my Paniceae and finds 5 
new species ! I think I should have sent them to Steudel, 
who (Munro tells me) is going to make a monograph of 
Panicum alone, containing 500 species ! Munro and I 
made 86 as I think in Herb. Hook. 
