358 
rate, and much smaller, though occasionally reaching a breadth of 
six inches, with leaflets over 314” 14’; involucral leaves more 
or less reduced, even sub-bracteal, three-divided, those of the 
succeeding series very small and bract-like, divided or cut- 
lobed. Umbellets very small at anthesis, few-flowered; sterile 
flowers with the perfect ones, never in separate heads, few, often 
only one or two in each umbellet, 1%” long, on pedicels not over 
1’’ long, often less; calyx deeply parted, sepals narrowly lanceo- 
late, acute or cuspidate, exceeding the minute white petals ; an- 
thers white, little exserted. Fruit subglobose, three together = 
one plane, the lateral spreading or slightly reflexed, very small, 1 > 
1%” long and broad, or, measured through the bristles, about 2 
long by 2’-3’’ wide; short-pedicelled, more distinctly so when 
young ; pedicels 4””-'%4”” long, wrinkled, striate ; bristles numer- 
ous, dilated below, somewhat regularly arranged in longitudinal 
rows, well developed to the very base of the carpels, of more unl- 
form length throughout than in Marylandica,and more Syren 
rarely exceeding 1’ in length, the uppermost closely parallel 
with and equaling, or slightly exceeding, the erect calyx-lobes ; 
styles small and difficult to observe, shorter than the calyx-lobes; 
mature fruit dull brown; commissural scar linear. Seed more 
rounded in cross-section than in Marylandica, the dorsal surface 
more prominently sulcate-fluted, the face convex, sometimes 
sharply so, and bevelled off on either side to permit a more interior 
position of the commissural oil-tubes than is seen in Marylan 
Root consisting of rigid horizontal fibres, which taper slenderly 
from a strong woody base. 
Massachusets to Florida and Texas, west to Kansas and Ne- 
braska. (Plate 243.) 
The genus Sanicula is set down as consisting of “ perennial 
herbs,” yet this plant, in the vicinity of New York at least, 1S 
not perennial but apparently biennial. Unlike Marylandica and 
Sregaria, the mature plant is readily puiled up from the soil, and 
in the autumn, while these species are still green, is to be found 
completely dead throughout, with the roots beginning to decay. 
This species stands sharply apart from both Marylandica and 
gregaria, not only in the characters of leaves, flowers and fruit, 
but in fundamental differences in the root and the plan of branch- 
ing. It is indeed hard to understand how such obviously distinct 
species could ever have been confused. 
The species shows two main lines of variation which, in their 
extreme manifestations, present plants of somewhat dissimilar o 
pect. On the one hand the result is a slender plant with sma 
