1917] Fernald,— Helianthemum dumosum on the Mainland 59 
cleistogamous flowers which Britton makes characteristic of the 
genus. At least, the herbarium specimens fail to show them; Spach, 
in publishing Crocanthemum, with C. carolinianum as the type, dis- 
tinctly stated that the flowers were all petaliferous; and Barnhart, 
in his key to Helianthemum in the second edition of Small’s Flora of the 
Southeastern United States, separates H. carolinianum from the other 
southeastern species by its having “ Flowers all alike and petaliferous.’”' 
Incidentally, H. carolinianum is a plant with stems and calyces hir- 
sute, while the species with apetalous cleistogamous flowers have the 
pubescence chiefly canescent-tomentulose or pannose. If it is justi- 
fiable to separate the plants with apetalous cleistogamous flowers as a 
genus, it would seem that they should not be forced into Crocanthe- 
mum, which is characterized by its lack of such flowers, but should be 
maintained in Spach’s extreme sense as Heteromeris. The characters 
used by Spach in distinguishing the genera proposed by him as segre- 
gates from Helianthemum are chiefly of the “more or less” type and, 
until they are better checked than has been done by those American 
botanists who have recently taken up Crocanthemum in a sense not 
intended by the author of the genus, it is wise to leave the plants in 
Helianthemum, where their status is free from question. 
It is noteworthy in this connection that even Dr. Britton, under 
Crocanthemum in the Illustrated Flora, inserts after C. majus a newly 
recorded species for the region, not as Crocanthemum but as Helian- 
themum georgianum, thus indicating that the change to Crocanthemum 
was made at the last moment and apparently without very careful 
study of the question. 
Such characters as the length of the style and its straight rather 
than curved tendency, upon which stress has been laid by students 
who have attempted to segregate Helianthemum into genera, as, for 
instance, Grosser? in Das Pflanzenreich, where our plants are placed 
in Halimium, quickly fail and it is doubtful if these characters are of 
greater value than in many other genera, such, for instance, as Carex, 
in which we find long or short, straight or curved styles. For example, 
Grosser’s Fig. 18,1, shows the flower of a Helianthemum (a genus 
with styles said to be usually curved) with the style quite as straight 
and as short as in his Fig. 9, G and H, illustrating Halimiwm rosmari- 
nifolium, a characteristic North American plant which is certainly 
1 Barnhart in Small, Fl. SE. U. S. ed. 2, 796 (1913). 
2 W, Grosser in Engler, Das Pflanzenr. IV. pt. 193 (1903). 
