CERTAIN MALVACEOUS TYPES. 207 
texture, the larger 7 inches wide and as long, of orbicular out- 
line, but with from 5 to 7 triangular lobes; these broadly, 
obtusely but mucronulately dentate; calyx cleft into ovate- 
acuminate lobes; corolla large, light rose-purple; seeds dis- 
tinctly and not sparsely hispidulous. 
Inhabits an island in the Kankakee River, Illinois, some 
twelve or fifteen miles above the city of Kankakee and just 
opposite a small village called Altorf; this the only known 
locality for this species. While by its dense pubescence it is next 
of kin to the real Z. acerifolia (excluding Z. rivularis), it is speci- 
fically distinct by characters of calyx and seed ; also as distinct 
from all others by its remarkable habit, being a large and bushy 
plant, all its congeners being few-stemmed and often without a 
branch. By the extreme distance intervening between the 
habitat of this local plant of eastern Illinois and that of its 
nearest congeners, which are of the Rocky Mountain region, any 
well travelled American botanist would know that this plant 
could not represent any Rocky Mountain species. The isolation 
of it is so complete that one does not see how any “authority ” 
could readily have pronounced it to be referable to a Pacific 
coast mountain species, even if it had not its two or three good 
characters. 
As far as the herbarium specimens here used are concerned, 
they are all of my own collecting, at the place where Mr. Hill, 
who first brought the plant to knowledge, collected his. The date 
of my visit to the spot was 1 Aug., 1899. — 
As consisting of a medley of incongruities, Malvastrum, as 
received in North America hitherto, is more confused than 
Sphaeralcea; and that there exists so much as one real Ma/- 
vastrum north of the Mexican border I hold to be most doubtful. 
I shall here indicate but two new genera of this aggregate. 
The characters of one became clear to me a dozen years since, 
when I had several of the species in cultivation at the Uni- 
versity of California. All of them are shrubs, and with long 
branches—in most species densely tomentose—usually flexu- 
