CERTAIN GENTIANACEAE. 93 
were taught to call Gentiana quingueflora. I had not seen it» 
except in the herbaria, for several decades of years; and my 
first glance at the plant awakened something like a regret for 
having, not many weeks before, been betrayed by false descrip- 
tions of it in the books, into placing it as a congeneric with 
those marella species of the farther West, the memory of 
whose floral characteristics was and is still vivid. 
Those western plants, genuine Amarella species, have a 
corolla-limb that is rotate when expanded, or nearly rotate, so 
that the corolla is salverform, or nearly that, and, at all events, 
the limb expands. The same is said to be true of the G. guin- 
queflora, but it is not so. Its corolla is not even truly funnel- 
form, for its limb is never expanded at all, in the proper use of 
that term. The whole corolla is tightly closed during almost 
the whole period of its existence; and the only writer who de- 
scribes it as if he had seen it with the eye of a botanist, calls it 
clavate. That is much nearer the truth than any one else has 
come; a not indistinct angularity of both tube and closed limb 
being the only obstacle to its being described as clavate. 
At the time when these plants are at their best, showing their 
corollas at full development and at the height of their inten- 
sity of purple coloring,—the time when you would take them 
for the making of the most perfect herbarium specimens—they 
are not in flower, but long past that period, the corollas already 
being filled with full grown capsules. At actual flowering the 
corollas are much smaller, the tips of their segments are sepa- 
rated just far enough to let air and small insects pass within ; 
they do not spread even so far as to become erect ; and then, im- 
mediately after fertilization of the ovary, the corolla closes, never 
again to open, but, immediately proceeds to increase to about 
twice the size it had at actual anthesis. 
These things are said confidently and for a certainty, only of 
the western plant, at page 53 preceding denominated Amare/la 
occidentalis; but they probably hold good, in at least some gene- 
ral way, for the other members of what, if I mistake not, is both 
a good genus, and one embracing several species, 
