Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

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San José, January 23, 1985.

Dear Bill:

I hope you will forgive that I let the card I got more than three weeks ago
wait so long, but the weather has forced me to work in the garden to clear things
for the summer if we want to get the fruits then available, in addition to several
smaller matters that take time...and of course the approaching old age that makes
even me slower in writing letters. But I realize that you have ten times more to
think of than we have so you may not even have observed the tardiness.

I am a little worried over that though we sent two weeks ago a package with
among others the wheatgrass paper of which I then had received thirty copies, or
half of the usual because of the size and costs...I had even added corrections
of the round fifteen printing errors, all but one small and insignificant, that
could not be avoided because the editors, who sat on the manuscript for one year
and a half, could not give me time enough to correct even the last proofs!...,,
though there are two weeks since it was sent, we have heard from none of the few
receiving it, so perhaps some worries are excusable when you have seen before
how some mail has atendency to go astray. Of course, one of these copies went to
your address...so if you have received it, the others are probably in place too.
But if you have not gotten your package, please, tell me so that I can get the
mail here to look around in their rooms...hope nothing is wrong nevertheless.

At about the same time as I got my reprints I got one from Dewey on his
review of the species growing wild or cultivated here on basis of the same system.
We disagree on some small points of misunderstanding I believe...mainly in the
Elytrigia group, where he sinks one genus into another and adds complex taxa
that causes one of my well-defined genera to take over the role of carry-all from
the old Elytrigia...and since he wrote that one of his associates, Wang, has
shown that the genomes Dewey claims differ XXXXXX not are actually distinct
in four chromosome pairs but similar in three, just as permitted for different
but related genomes according to the definition of the term by Kihara and others,
cf. my 1982 paper. I expect that when a little more thinking and evaluating has
been done, my Lophopyrum and Thinopyrum will be accepted even by Dewey, also
Elytrigia s.str., whereas the group I put as Elytrigia section Trichophorae
may need to be lifted to generic status, for instance as Trichopyrum based on
the sectional description by Dubovik...for old A. intermedium etc. You will
understand my thoughts when you see the paper. In that connection I must ask you
if Dewey sent you a copy, since if he did not, you will want to ask him for one
copy of his very fine final review of a work that nobody has done as well. His
paper is named The genomic system of classification as a guide to intergeneric
hybridization with the perennial Triticeae, and is printed in a book on Gene
manipulation in plant improvement edited by J. P. Gustafson and published 1984
by Plenum Publishing Corporation. Needless to say, the genomic system is the same
I have been advocating for years and which we have shared and Cronquist misunderstood
like the other popes of the groups fighting about the meaningless terms lumpers
and splitters that Europeans never have understood because they do not know the
background...although in the wheatgrasses several genomes differ cytologically
and genically despite having the same basic number, in many other taxa the only
indication of differences in genomic constitution may be different basic numbers.
Or different basic numbers and variations in chromosome morphology, as, e.g. in Crepis.