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species, and most unlike any other American Erysimum. It is - 
. a broad, matted, evergreen shrub, the dead foliage of one or two 
preceding seasons firmly persistent still, on all the branchlets. 
Our specimens are mostly in leaf only, the flowering season having 
been perhaps six months past. One specimen was found partly 
in flower, and with a few clusters of well matured pods which had 
not yet shed their seeds. 
A New Genus of Grasses. 
By Dr. GEo. VASEY. 
(PLATE LX.) 
Orcuttia.—Tribe FESTUCE, Sub-tribe SESLERIE. Pan- 
icle simple; spikelets sessile, alternate, many flowered, com- 
pressed, upper ones crowded; empty and flowering glumes 
much alike, green and thickish, broad, 3 to 5-lobed, unawned, 
strongly many nerved; palet equaling its glume, hyaline, nar. 
now, green on the strongly angled keels; anthers 3, styles 2, 
filaments and styles at length projecting beyond the flower. 
O. CALIFORNICA.—Plant dwarf, 2 to 4 inches high, annual ; 
growing in small clusters of 10 to 20 or more culms from one 
root; culms variable in length in the same cluster, generally pro- 
ducing some small flowering branches from the lower joints; leaves 
2 or 3, the sheaths open and inflated, striate; ligule obsolete ; 
blade rather rigid, about 1 inch long, acuminate; leaves and 
sheaths sparsely pubescent; panicle about 1 inch long, simple, 
usually of 4 to 6 alternate sessile spikelets, the lower 2 or 3 
rather distant, the upper ones crowded; spikelets 5 to 10 flow- 
- ered, empty glumes sparsely pubescent, broad, about 2 lines long, 
scarious-margined, mostly 3 lobed, the 2 outer lobes longer, the - 
lobes each three-nerved; flowering glumes a little exceeding 2 
lines long, with 5 nearly equal, acute lobes, each lobe three- 
nerved ; palet as long as its glume, hyaline, narrow, strongly 
keeled, dentate at apex. 
Sometimes several spikelets are clustered together at the 
apex of the culm, with only one pair of empty glumes for all. 
A dwarf grass collected near San Quentin Bay, Lower Califor- 
nia, by Mr. C. R. Orcutt, an ardent young naturalist of San 
Diego, Cal., for whom the genus is named. 
