Systematic botany
Many years ago, I gave living grasses to several colleges. One professor of agriculture made some experiments and wrote reports. He
afterwards told me that he had made a mistake or had taken one grass
for the other.
After his death, I bought for the herbarium about 2,500 fungi that
G. H. Hicks had collected. He had large numbers of single leaves or
parts of leaves as hosts for some fungi, quantities of parts of leaves of
many species of Carex, apparently all of them not correctly named-he
was mistaken in supposing that all were the hosts of Puccinia Caricis.
I threw all that lot away as worthless.
The student of parasitic fungi must know for sure the names of the
hosts. In many cases this knowledge means a lot of systematic botany.
The person who looks after the lists of weeds and grasses, trees and
shrubs for an agricultural college is helpless without systematic botany.
The same is true of the student of ecology. I could give the name of a
professor who once showed me specimens which he had collected and
written about, some of which he named wrong.
In another case a student had written a thesis for a second degree on
Bermuda grass, while his plant was Sisyrinchium Bermudianum (?), a
plant of the Iris family, a horrid blunder. His committee did not consult
a botanist.
I presume other botanists have adopted a scheme which I have followed
in collecting parasitic fungi, viz., in starting out to collect have one or
more lists of hosts to look for and then look for the parasite.
In this short paper I have said enough to show the mistakes in ignoring
the ability to identify seed-plants with certainty.
Amherst, Mass.

19th Mich. Acad. Sci. Rept., 1917.