always with me been a favourite, as it is the first genus I ever at- 
tempted to describe, and dedicated to an old friend and accurate 
botanist, Zaccheus Collins, Esq., of Philadelphia, long since dead. 
I found it in my first journey into the western interior of Ame- 
rica (1812), growing in rich and rather shady alluvial lands 
betwixt Franklin and Erie, in West Pennsylvania, which appears 
to be near upon its eastern limit. From my friend Professor 
Short I have it from near Lexington, Kentucky ; it is also com- 
mon in Missouri, but ceases long before arriving at the Rocky 
Mountains, at the sources of the Platte, where the climate be- 
comes too dry for it. ‘The seeds I received by post from Dr. 
Short were collected in his garden on the Ist of June, last year, 
1855; on the 25th of June I had some of them already planted, 
but none came up until the month of August, and those unfor- 
tunately were all but ove devoured by snails. I planted more 
seeds in September, and from those have arisen, with a good many 
others, the plants I send. I put them out-of-doors in pots de- 
fended by open wide-necked glass shades, in which way they do 
better than im a frame or greenhouse. The winter or autumnal 
young plants endure the severe winters in Kentucky perfectly 
well, and there begin to flower about the Ist of April.” 
Our plants flowered in a cool frame early in April and con- 
tinued blooming for a long time. ‘Treated as a hardy annual it 
will prove, when sufficiently abundant, a charming bedding- 
out species. 
Dzscr. Annual. Our native specimens in the Herbarium 
are generally small and straggling. Cultivation improves the 
plant exceedingly ; it then grows more erect, stouter, is from a 
span to a foot high, and bears a succession of flowers, like the 
Pentstemons. Stem opposite, terete; branches glabrous, the ex- 
tremities only being a little downy. Leaves glabrous: radical 
ones, between cordate and orbicular, on long petioles; cauline 
ones sessile, ovate, crenato-dentate, rather obtuse ; supreme leaves 
or dracteas in whorls of four, linear and entire. Pedicels solitary 
and axillary from the leaves, sometimes from the lowest pair 
of cauline or sessile leaves. Calyx two-lipped, of five, deep, 
broad-lanceolate, acute, ciliated segments. Corolla large in 
proportion to the plant: wpper lip snowy-white, bipartite: the 
_ lobes rather diverging, retuse: /ower lip bright azure-blue, with 
white rays: middle lobe obsolete, forming a plica, which receives 
the stamens and style: side lobes conspicuous, emarginate. 
Fig. 1. Calyx and pistil :—magnified. 
