(5ra$ Iberbarium 
Ibarvarfc TTiniwrsiti? 
B. L. ROBINSON, Curator, 
Asa Gray Prof. Syst, Bot. 
M. L. FERNALD, 
Fisher Prof. Nat. Hist. (Bot.) 
MARY A, DAY, Librarian 
EDITH M. VINCENT, 
Assistant in Library 
IVAN M. JOHNSTON, Assistant 
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A. 
Dec. 14, 1922. 
Dear Mr. Waatherby,- 
You were indiscreet enough, or kind enough to 
leq.ve a lopp-hole which Dodge and I are forced to take advantage 
of, for we have spent a large amount of time in the last three weeks 
writing to many people and waiting for their answers which have been 
absolutely uniform; — Mackenzie, Bicknell, Lambert, Hunnewell, 
Weston, Dodge, Thaxter, Wiegand and various others all turning us 
down and leaving us with absolutely no programme for the New England 
Botanical Club meeting, largely because df the various conflicts 
with meetings and because people who have anything to do are doing 
it somewhere else 1 . 
I had picked out a wall exhibit and series of recently described 
plants along with the species from which they have been segregated, 
and had planned to say something of this sort in a ten minute ex¬ 
planation of the exhibit, namely: that the necessity of segregating 
new species is by no means ahiodern one, but that from the earliest 
settlement of North America there wes a tendency to"lump" all 
American plants with something similar which had been known in 
Europe, with the result that the earliest systematists who worked with 
American plants, like Linnaeus, segregated many American species from 
the European, but left many other included with them which their 
successors have gradually found upon study have perfectly constant 
characters of flowers or fruit. A large proportion of these things 
were recognized by the systematists of one to one-and-a-haIf centuries 
ago, but they were too advanced for their time, and only within recent 
years have many of their species been recognized as wholly justified. 
Eor instance, Linnaeus recognized Polypodium virginianum, Anemone 
^quin^uefolia, etc. Michaux and Jacob Bigelow and others pointed out 
differences in other species which were falsely passing in America as 
Old World types, and the process of eliminating these falsely identi¬ 
fied species in America is still going on from time to time, and 
instead of making confusion in 3otany, is really clarifying the 
subject and putting our classification upon a sound, instead of a 
careless and inaccurate basis. That was the kind of sermon I proposed 
to preach merely because there would be many people there,who, with 
Rand, Williams and others love to say "Damn the segregaters"'. 
The exhibit which I picked out consists of Polypodium vulgare and 
virginianum; Anemone #nemerosa and quin$uefolia; with sketches on the 
sheet of the very different achenes; Circaea lutetiana and latifolia, 
with penciled sketches of the petals and fruits; Trientalis europea 
and U. borealis; oxalis Acetosella and 0. montana, with sketches on 
the sheets of the petals and capsules; Hepatica nobilis and H. ameri- 
cana, with sketches of the very different achenes; Vallisneria spiralis, 
'^~V. americana. showing the staminate spathes; Ammophila arenaria and 
A. brevilegulata, with the ligules pointed out; Rynohospora macrotachya 
