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Some Californian Ranunculi. 
By EpwarpD L. GREENE. 
The first one I would mention, although it is a very common 
plant of the California Coast Range, and especially plentiful 
among the hills back of Oakland and south of San Francisco, 
was first noticed in the Botany of the State Geological Survey 
(1876), where it is named R. hebecarpus, var. pusillus. The 
flowers of this plant have not yet been described. They are so 
minute as to become, in the dried specimen, nearly invisible. 
Even with the fresh plant in hand, something better than a pocket 
lens is requisite to the revealing of their characteristics, which 
are very unique indeed. They are remarkable among flowers of 
this genus both for the extreme paucity of their parts, and for 
the very curious kind of symmetry which they display. 
By way of preparing the reader’s mind to rightly appreciate 
the symmetry referred to, and which I am about to describe, let 
“me say that the flowers of Ranunculi in general are not so wholly 
unsymmetrical as they are commonly allowed to be. The sepals 
are five, the petals five (in some species ten or fifteen), the sta- 
mens and pistils both (theoretically at least, and often in fact), of 
some larger multiple of five. Of the species here under con- 
sideration, I have examined this year some scores of examples, 
and I find the following to be the rule of its floral structure. It 
has, instead of the five sepals of ordinary Ranunculi, four only ; 
and these four sepals are, moreover, not flat and reflexed accord- 
ing to the rule in the genus, but spreading and somewhat cymbi- 
form, each embracing a pistil, much after the manner in which 
a number of the Californian Composite have the ovaries of their 
ray-flowers enfolded each by a corresponding involucral bract. 
In the place of the missing sepal of the five there occurs, or- 
dinarily, not a petal but a stamen. That this particular stamen, 
which stands by itself alongside the one akene that lacks a sub- 
tending sepal, replaces the missing sepal we know from the fact 
that the stamens themselves are as definite in number as are the 
sepals, each of them as strictly keeping its own place; and the 
stamens too are four only, The petal is solitary, and, instead of 
taking the place, as it might have been expected to do, of the 
