Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
The following systematic notes have been accumulated in connectionwith economic studies of Puerto Rico[1] palms, and althoughthe list is doubtless still incomplete, the printing of it may be justifiedas a means of securing at least provisional names needed forreference purposes in connection with other publications of a non-systematiccharacter.
The palms may well be considered a very refractory groupwhen handled by the conventional methods of systematic botany.Difficult at once to collect or to study from dried material, theyare commonly neglected both in the field and in the herbarium,with the result that literature is scanty and unsatisfactory. A verylarge proportion of the descriptions are entirely inadequate for theidentification of species, and there has been much lawlessness anddiversity in the application of generic names, as will appear fromsome of the instances discussed below. Difficulties of descriptionand classification have also been multiplied by the fact that thepalms are such peculiar plants that analogies and criteria borrowedfrom other families are often inapplicable and misleading. Moreover,the terminology of parts and characters has not been developedto the point where the expression of observed differences iseasy, and available language often fails completely to suggestthe significance of the characters used. Thus the fibers into whichparts of the leaf-bases of many palms are resolved afford many526diagnostic characters, for which we have no parallels in othergroups of plants.
A compensating advantage may be drawn, however, from thedefinite and often very limited geographical distribution of thespecies of palms. Thus, although Puerto Rico is a relativelysmall island, several of the indigenous palms have apparentlyranged in nature over but a small part of it, and a locality definitelyindicated would often go further toward establishing theidentity of a species than much of the descriptive matter preparedfor this purpose. For the present, at least, the geographical ideashould be kept uppermost in systematic studies of the palms, sinceit is generally much easier and far more logical to extend the limitsof supposed distribution and unite supposed species, than to copewith the confusion caused by the miscellaneous reporting of speciesfar outside their natural ranges.
From the popular standpoint another serious inconvenience ofthe systematic literature of palms arises from the fact that it isbased so largely on floral characters that even the botanical travelermight need to wait months for the blossoms and then climb thetrees or cut them down before being abl