1917] Blake,— Statice in North America 5 
varietal recognition. The Californian material, distinguishable at a 
glance by its longer broader leaves and generally taller scapes, has 
always glabrous leaves with a very blunt sometimes almost truncate 
tip, naturally more obvious in the broader-leaved specimens but dis- 
tinguishable in all. In the Alaskan material, on the other hand, the 
usually much shorter, narrower, and laxer leaves are always more or 
less ciliate, and the tip is distinctly subulate-pointed. However no 
absolute line of demarcation exists. In the specimens collected by 
Bridges (no. 320) and Bolander in California the glabrous leaves are 
often more or less subulate-pointed; Allen’s number 96, from Wash- 
ington, like Lyall’s plants from Vancouver Island, is also more or 
less intermediate in this respect; and Rosendahl & Brand’s 19, from 
Vancouver Island, although with the stiff glabrous leaves of the Cali- 
fornian plant, is quite intermediate in nature of leaf-tip. While the 
Alaskan form, in habit and in leaf-apex, thus shows a likeness to the 
eastern form, its calyx-characters are distinctly those of the Cali- 
fornian plant, with which as has been shown it intergrades, and the 
two seem best treated as varieties of one species. 
The relationship of the Californian plant, which was described by 
Boissier as a variety of Armeria andina Poepp. (Statice andina 
(Poepp.) Rendle), to the latter is quite evident when material of the 
two is compared. The two collections in the Gray Herbarium (by 
C. Gay and Reed) referable to S. andina nevertheless show sufficiently 
marked differential characters from the North American species to 
make it inadvisable to unite them, particularly when the great gap in 
their ranges is considered. They have an apparently much longer 
leafy axis than the Californian plant, and the blunted emarginate 
calyx-lobes are mucronulate or aristulate from the terminal notch 
by the prolonged midribs of the lobes. The stem is also strongly 
pustulose, a feature perhaps of no great consequence but at any 
rate consistently shown by the South American material in the Gray 
Herbarium. Although the resemblance between the two is sufficient 
to indicate the possibility of a genetic relationship in the not very 
remote past, the present gap in characters and range and the inter- 
gradation above demonstrated between the Alaskan and Californian 
extremes indicate that the latter is best treated as a variety of the 
Alaskan plant. 
