SOME CRITICAL SPECIES OF ECHIUM. 311 
l'espèce, mais, comme il arrivait souvent aux anciens botanistes, il l'a établie 
sur un exemplaire qui porte les signes évidents de culture. Il s'ensuit que 
certains caractères ont pu étre altérés, c'est ce qui est arrivé pour les feuilles 
qui sont ovales dans les échantillons des herbiers Lamarck et Jussieu et 
oblongues dans ceux récoltés par Bourgeau." Just so; but the remark 
about the leaves is going too far ; the species which has been modified by 
cultivation is the essentially similar “ grandiflorum,” not the essentially 
different Coineyanum. 
Then de Coiney goes on: “son inflorescence lâchement paniculée lui 
assigne une place à part et ne convient à aucune des espèces qui ont été 
confondues avec elle." This is strikingly true of the Lamarck and Linnean 
specimens, and also of the more luxuriant individuals of Algerian grandi- 
florum, but does not hold good for Bourgeau’s plants, in which the 
inflorescence shows no marked difference from that of the forms called 
pustulatum by writers on the flora of Spain. 
This should be enough to clear the Bourgeau specimens out of the way, 
and to exclude the possibility of Æ. Coincyanum being the progenitor of 
Lamarck’s australe. It remains to consider from what form of grandiflorum 
that garden plant ean have arisen. E. grandiflorum occurs in five geo- 
graphical areas: 1. Algeria and the adjacent regions; 2. Sardinia aud 
Corsica ; 3. The French department of the Var; 4. North-Eastern Spain 
and the adjacent district of France; 5. Portugal. Areas 4 and 5 are the most 
likely to have supplied the seed, and I should have said preferably 4, where 
individuals almost identical with the cultivated plant occur, but that Lamarck 
himself has hinted at Portugal. Area 3 is most improbable, because the 
variety that predominates there is very unlike Lamarck's. 
1. The Algerian plant is very abundant and practically only differs from 
Lamarck’s type in its somewhat longer corollas. Desfontaines says : “ affine 
I. australi Lam. differt foliis levibus aut tuberculis vix conspicuis conspersis, 
corolla duplo triplove majore." The relative size of the corolla is here much 
exaggerated. Many, though not all, Algerian specimens show leaves with 
enough tubercles to be undistinguishable from those of Lamarck. As far as 
habit is concerned, that garden form looks like an extreme case of the 
more diffuse and broad-leaved Algerian specimens from rich situations. 
M. Battandier, the father of Algerian botanists, writes “les feuilles varient 
assez de dimensions suivant que le sol est plus ou moins fertile." There are 
plenty of Algerian specimens in the herbaria. I will only quote Reverchon, 
Pl. Alg. 1896, no. 68, from Bougie, and Faure’s exsicc. from Oran à Santa 
Cruz, as luxuriant examples, the latter with smaller flowers than usual. 
The middle stem-leaves of these are trom 2 to 3 cm. broad. 
2. I have not seen enough material from these islands to speak of the form 
that occurs there. Moris indicates creticum, in the sense of australe, from 
Sardinia, Fl. Sard. iii. p. 128, tab. xevii., and his specimens bear out the 
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