CERTAIN CRUCIFEROUS TYPES. 219 



Certain Cruciferous Types. 



PoLYCTENiUM is here proposed as a generic name for a type 

 which only by most superficial inspection, joined to a total 

 disregard of vegetative characters, has found place in books 

 and herbaria under the name of Smelowskia Fremontii. To 

 the eye of experience there is not a suggestion here of the 

 genus Smelowskia, which are not only soft-wooly herbs, but 

 their herbage is soft as to texture, that is, it is yielding or pli- 

 able, whereas in Polyctenium it is in every part rigid, wiry as 

 to the stems, and as to the leaves stiffly acerose, almost prickly; 

 also the basal and subterranean parts are as different as imag- 

 inable. Of the branched caudex, its members deeply in- 

 vested with the soft-chaffy leaf-bases, which one notes uni- 

 versally in Smelowskia, there is no trace in Polyctenium. So 

 strong is the contrast between the two that when the latter 

 first came to my knowledge, and I thought it a plant unde- 

 scribed, I referred it to Braya and published it as B. pectinata. 

 If any one had pretended to assure me that the plant was a 

 Smelowskia I should have been heedless of the proposition. 

 I have never been able to appreciate that now time-honored 

 artificialism in botany that ignores vegetative and habital 

 characteristics. But the pods even in this plant hax^e not al- 

 ways been looked into with due discrimination. They have 

 been described as linear and tetragonal ; but while their angu- 

 larity is obscure, their more distinctive mark is that they are 

 definitely, though in the type species but slightly, obcom- 

 pressed. Measured transversely to the partition they are 

 wider than the partition itself, a character which comes out 

 strongly in a species never until now published. The origi- 

 nal of the genus is frequent in southern Oregon, particularly 

 in the Klamath Lake country, and southward into northern 

 California. I call it 



Polyctenium Fremontii. 



P01.VCTENIUM Gi.ABEi.ivUM . Larger than P. Fremontii, 

 quite devoid of distinctively basal pectinate foliage, and the 

 plant almost glabrous, only few and scattered short and mostly 



