Pittonia/Volume 1/Recent Botanical Literature
| Recent Botanical Literature |
| The Cayuga Flora.Part 1.A Catalogue of the Phænogamia growing without Cultivation in the Cayuga Lake Basin.By William R. Dudley. |
Local plant catalogues, as they run, seldom rise to the dignity of literature. They are commonly mere lists of names, useful to people who make exchange of specimens, but otherwise of little value. The present Catalogue, being volume two of the Bulletin of the Cornell University, is exceptional among catalogues in that it merits a place among real books and very good books of local botany. The author is one who has studied with a zeal and a love, the flora of his district. His five and twenty pages placed under the modest title of an Introduction, constitute what is perhaps the most admirable piece of local botanical history hitherto published in America. From quoting instructive paragraphs out of the Relations of the Jesuit fathers who knew this Cayuga region and wrote about it more than two centuries ago, he passes to the observations of John Bartram, who journeyed to those wilds, as they then were, in 1743; shows that the immortal Peter Kalm from Finland (Abo, or perhaps admissably written Aabo, but not “Aobo” penetrated to the same new field a few years after Bartram: gives long passages from Pursh's Journal, with the original Purshian English all faithfully preserved, relating to the Cayuga Lake country: and all these things reveal a certain literary taste which scientific writers do not always possess.
In the catalogue itself one finds recorded all the particular localities of the less common and rare species still existing, or to be looked for in the region, and more than that, the names, stations, dates and collectors' names, of many species obtained there in years long past, and which are now extinct. The historic interest of the catalogue is therefore of the highest order in every way.
As regards nomenclature the work is, with some exceptions, well in accordance with the latest standards. But we could have wished to see the name Solea conolor, Gingins, rather than Ionidium concolor, Benth. & Hook. With us who are as familiar with Ionidiurn of Western America as with Solea of the Atlantic side of the continent, the two genera are not to be confounded. Professor Gray has somewhere given expression to the same opinion, and has signified that Solea is to be retained in the Synoptical Flora. Doubtless also in the matter of that shrub early known as Spirrœa opulifolia, Linn., the editor should have passed by the synonym, Neillia opulifolia, Benth. & Hook. and have written Physocarpus opulifolius, Maximowicz. For Nesœa verticillata, HBK., an older name, and that by one of our classical American authors, Decodon verticillatus, Elliott, is judged to be the right one, in the recent scholarly monograph of Lythraceæ, by Dr. Kœhne. Typographical errors in the volume are few, and the treatise does credit not only to the author but to the institution under whose auspices it is given to the public.