In no respect is the description of a plant more often doubtful than in the color assigned to the flowers, especially if any trace of violet be present in the coloring. It is not at all uncommon to hear some one, reading the description of a flower, exclaim regarding the color, "that is wrong." During the past ten years I have noted with much interest the different expressions used by students in my classes to describe the color of some of our most common wild flowers. As a rule, I have found that young ladies are much more explicit in their description of the color of a flower than the young men of equal intellectual advancement. This is probably not due to a keener color sense, but to the possession of a fuller vocabulary of color terms. In consequence of this fuller vocabulary, the young lady seeks to express smaller differences of color. I have not found, however, that she is more accurate in her description of the color in question. Indeed, it has often seemed to me that the smaller vocabulary has led to a more careful discrimination and a more correct discernment of the components of the color. What we most need is not a fuller vocabulary but a more accurate use of the vocabulary we now possess. It is no doubt a fact that an occasional source of confusion in the description of floral color is a more or less feeble sense in regard to some one color. But this difficulty can not be of sufficiently frequent occurrence to be a serious source of confusion. The percentage of persons who are either color blind or possess only a feeble sense for some one color is so small that there is certainly likely to arise no very frequent trouble from such a source. The confusion of color description arises mainly from two clearly discernible sources both of which, it seems to me, we may reasonably hope to be able to remove. The first of these sources needs hardly more than the mere mention to be recognized by every botanist. I refer to the fact that we have absolutely no recognized standards of color, and no generally accepted plan of color nomenclature. To say nothing of the conflicting theories of color which are still in vogue, each of which has its adherents, nearly every writer