180 Rhodora [OCTOBER 
worthy that the keen earlier generations of American and European 
botanists were perfectly aware of a difference and treated the com- 
moner native plant of America either as a distinct species or an Ameri- 
can variety. In 1804 Willdenow, in Hortus Berolinensis, described 
and illustrated from Pennsylvania Prunella pensylvanica,' said to differ 
from P. vulgaris by slight characters of the flowers but shown in the 
plate as a plant with remarkably toothed leaves such as it is impossible 
to match by any American material known to the writer. Whether 
Willdenow’s plate was based upon an American plant seems very 
doubtful and his herbarium material, according to Bentham,’ was a 
mixture; but under the name P. pennsylvanica the commonest lanceo- 
late-leaved American plant was taken up by Jacob Bigelow (1814), 
Pursh (1814), Amos Eaton (1818) and others and kept apart as a 
species from the ovate-leaved P. vulgaris. 
Others of the same and immediately succeeding generations treated 
this narrow-leaved plant as a variety of the broader-leaved one. Thus 
we find Nuttall saying (without, however, any definition or other 
indication of just what he included in his variety): “8 pennsylvanica. 
A mere variety of the preceding [P. vulgaris], which is certainly an 
introduced plant, never appearing far beyond the precincts of habita- 
tions.’ Barton, in the same year, took up P. pennsylvanica as a 
species, apparently to cover all the Eastern American material, and 
divided it into two varieties: a ovata, with “leaves ovate” [true P. 
vulgaris] and 8 lanceolata, with “leaves lanceolate”;* and subsequently 
supplied a beautiful plate and detailed description? of his P. pennsyl- 
vanica, B. lanceolata so that there is no question that he had the common 
American plant with lanceolate leaves gradually narrowed to the base, 
and the bracts and calyces green, the former copiously ciliate. Sub- 
sequently many authors, Bigelow in the 2d edition of the Florula 
Bostoniensis (1824), Beck (1833) and others, recognized that P. penn- 
sylvanica, at least of Pursh and subsequent authors, though not 
exactly of Willdenow, was an American variety of P. vulgaris. 
In 1834 the same plant was treated by Bentham in his monograph 
of the Labiatae as P. vulgaris, “y elongata, foliis integris oblongo- 
lanceolatis, glabris vel parce villosis. . . .in America boreali vulgaris, in 
1 Willd. Hort. Berol. t. ix (1804). 
? Benth. Lab. Gen. et Sp. 417 (1834). 
: Nutt. Gen. ii. 37 (1818). 
* Barton, Fl. Phil. ii. 37 (1818). 
5 Barton, Fl. N. A. ii. 69, t. 60 (1822). 
