Novitates Boreali-Americanae. VI. 109 
covery. There are too many of the great states to the eastward of the 
Mississippi concerning each of which its is to be said that only some 
few fractional parts of its territory has been botanically explored. On 
this same „C. Canadensis“ territory not a few hundreds of plants and 
trees entirely new have been discovered, even within the last fifteen 
years. Not the ratio of one out of a thousand of the cercis trees and 
bushes of the eastern part of North America has been collected from, 
or even seen by any botanist. It is very easily possible that, in the 
prodigious field of the unexplored forests and mountains of Maryland, 
Virginia, the Carolinas, and more than as many other states adjoining 
them, some cercis many yet come to light answering the Linnaean des- 
cription of C. Canadensis, Things as strange happen new every year, 
since the botanists of our land have learned, though late, that the bo- 
tany of our older books was both scanty and superficial. 
In succeeding paragraphs of this paper account is given of two 
cercis species having foliage somewhat notably pubescent. One of them is 
Georgian, the other Texan. The habitat of each is far removed from 
any locality whence those seeds might be believed to have come which 
produced the shrub known to, and cultivated by Linnaeus. It is there- 
fore most improbable that either of my pubescent species can be an 
equivalent of the Linnaean C. Canadensis. 
Two new types from Georgia constitute all that I have undertaken 
to set forth positively, on material from what has commonly been thought 
of as C. Canadensis territory; not that there are not more or less plain 
indications of several more; but I leave that work to the future, and 
for further investigation, now taking in *and mainly certain hitherto 
undescribed species belonging to the farther Southwest and West. 
In Europe and eastern Asia the home of Cercis is the Mediterranean 
region, quite exclusively. There is in northern Europe no species at all; 
therefore no counterpart to our C. Canadensis. On our continent, ho- 
wever, physiographie conditions approximating those of the Mediter- 
ranean oceur only in the far Southwest, namely, between and including 
Texas and California; and, quite as we might have anticipated, it is in 
this vast region that the genus finds its larger amplification on our side 
of the Atlantic. Moreover, and also as might have been predicted, these 
over western American species are manifestly allied to the Mediterranean 
type, rather than to our own eastern and northern C. Canadensis. When 
first a western cercis fall into the hands of a botanist — a man of 
high renown — he pronounced it a mere variation of the Mediterranean 
C. Süiquastrum. That -was Bentham's disposal of it; though it has 
long since come to be recogniged as distinct, being the C. occidentalis 
Torrey, Next came the discovery of a Texan species, also of the same 
oriental group, to which Engelmann assigned the name C. reniformis. 
Of these western shrubs there has come to exist in the United 
States National Herbarium, and in my own together, such an array ofspecimens 
referable to neither of the two species hitherto recognized, that the 
names and diagnoses of a number of new ones is urgently called for. 
