8 - Notes on Cactee. | ZOE 
California. The name is in allusion to the dark bands which 
encircle the plant, giving it much the appearance of a raccoon’s 
tail. 
M. venusta. Simple becoming cespitose in clusters of, in 
extreme cases, as many as 40; heads 2-4, very rarely, in center 
of large clusters, 6 cm. high, a little less in diameter; tubercles 
thick and short, concave at the end, greenish, purplish to nearly 
white, glaucous; axils only slightly woolly, soon naked; radial 
spines, 9-15, stout, 6-12 mm. long; centrals typically solitary, 
IO-I5 mm., sometimes 2 or 3, in a single specimen 4, porrect- 
spreading, the three upper very short; flowers about 4 cm. in 
diameter, rose-color, widely spreading, tube very short; petals 
lanceolate acute, recurved-spreading; style-branches 5, ap- 
parently rosy brown; fruit 114-2 cm. long, scarlet, linear, circum- 
scissile some distance above the base, nearly dry; seeds oblong- 
obovate, rather less than 1 mm. long, constricted above the basal 
portion, which is half as long and nearly as wide as the upper; 
surface dull, minutely pitted, the pits much obscured by delicate 
intervening striz; hilum basal, large and triangular. 
Collected by Mr. T. S. Brandegee in the vicinity of San José 
del Cabo, Baja California, in Sept., 1890. (No. 240, WM. Good- 
richit, of ‘‘Flora of the Cape Region’’); again Sept. 1893, and 
for the third time last year in numerous living specimens. It 
has been known for some time that it was undescribed, but in 
this group complete material is necessary. The spines are from 
pure white, barely tipped with brown, to dark brown, whitish 
only near the base. The flowers, which appear in September, 
hide the whole plant, and it is of such low growth as to look 
like a beautiful cluster of flowers springing from the sand. ‘The 
fruit appearing in winter is nearly dry and falls very readily 
when ripe, leaving most of the seeds in the axillary cup. It is 
the only circumscissile mamillaria known to me. 
M. Schumanii Hildm. M. f. K. i., 125, abb. bei Pp: 103, 
bears some resemblance to J/. venusta, but is a much larger, rel- 
atively more slender plant, and presumably came from the main- 
land, Dr. Schumann remarks in Monog. Cact. 545, that he has 
