70 Rhodora [APRIL 
re-merged with P. maritimum and has been so denominated by prac- 
tically every subsequent student of the group, although the duration 
of the plant has caused considerable embarrassment. Thus Torrey 
himself, in 1843, placing P. glaucum again in P. maritimum, said: 
* Annual (in the Southern States apparently perennial, and even 
suffrutescent as in the plant of the Mediterranean shores)"; but in a 
succeeding paragraph he further qualified his statement by adding: 
* It is not improbable that the southern plant may be only an annual; 
for I have not seen the root, and ours is hard and woody at the base, 
particularly late in the season." ! The first edition of Gray's Manual 
indicated it as annual, doubtfully perennial; the second, third and 
fourth editions called it annual but further confused its identity by 
reducing it to the very different P. aviculare, var. littorale Link and 
adding as synonyms the equally different P. maritimum Ray (P. Rai 
Bab.) and the even more distinct P. Roberti Loisel. In the fifth edi- 
tion of the Manual P. glaucum somewhat cleared itself of these en- 
tangling alliances but still passed as P. maritimum and was said to 
have *a hard and somewhat woody and perennial root...at the 
north apparently only annual"; in the Sixth edition, as P. maritimum, 
it is called “Perennial, at length woody at base (or sometimes 
annual)"; and in the seventh edition, as species no. 1, P. maritimum, 
it is indicated with no. 2, P. Fowleri (always annual so far as the 
writer has observed at numerous stations) as an exceptional species 
of the section Avicularia, which is said to consist of “ glabrous annuals, 
except nos. 1 and 2." Wood, also, passed through a similar psycho- 
logical (not to say imitative) change in regard to the plant, in the 
second edition of his Class Book (1847) saying it was annual and 
treating it as Polygonum aviculare, B. glaucum, a treatment which 
also occurs in the so-called * Forty-first Edition" of 1856. In the 
edition of 1861, however, he swung with the general tide, treated the 
plant as P. maritimum and said that it was perennial. Small, also, 
in his Monograph of the North American Species of Polygonum ? 
and in Britton & Brown's Illustrated Flora and the different editions 
of Britton's Manual has accepted the traditional statement and says 
of the plant, as P. maritimum: “Perennial or sometimes annual." 
'The conspicuous feature of these characterizations, it will be seen, 
is that, when treated as Polygonum maritimum, the description of 
1 Torr. Fl. N. Y. ii. 153 (1843). 
? Small, Mem. Dept. Bot. Columbia Col. i. 100 (1895). 
