131 
name. The plant has been variously known as S. Lermudianum 
L., S. angustifolium Miller and S. anceps Cav. These names are 
in indiscriminate use to-day. 
It has been a subject of disagreement whether the name Ser- 
mudiana of Linnaeus belongs more properly to the Bermudan 
than to the American plant. The title of the insular species is 
certainly not without a slight flaw of indirection ; on the other 
hand it can scarcely be held that the claim of the continental plant 
is better founded—its support involves an undue insistence on 
merely technical points at best of uncertain bearing in this par- 
ticular case. In these circumstances that course seems to be 
right which unreservedly concedes the name Bermudiana to the 
Bermudan plant. 
But even in its time-honored employment in American botany 
the name Sermudiana, it appears, has been used to designate quite 
another form of Szsyrinchium than the one to which it was ap- 
plied in Species Plantarum. Its application by Linnaeus was not 
at all, or only in doubtful part, to the plant of our Atlantic sea- 
beard which has borne the name—the plant with broadly-winged, 
branching stem and subequal spathal bracts. The species which 
was primarily, if not solely designated by Linnaeus, is the plant 
of more northward extension, having a slender, simple stem and 
unequally bracted spathe, which has been known by Michaux’s 
name, mucronatum. Linnaeus’s description is distinctive of 
neither species, but his plant was based on Plukenet (Phyt. p/. 67, 
f. z. 1691, and Almag. 345, 1696) and on Dillenius (Hort. 
Elth. 49, p/. gz, f. 49. 1732). Plukenet both by description and 
illustration is perfectly clear; his plant is the one we have been 
calling mucronatum. It may be added that the precedence given as 
to the American over the Bermudan plant in Species Plantarum is 
in conformity with the numbering of Plukenet’s figures, which, 
singularly enough, reverses the order of the figures themselve, ae 
and of the descriptions as well. = 
The exact plant of the Species Plantarum is so perfectly estab- oS 
lished by the primary reference to Plukenet that it is of little con- 
sequence to find that Dillenius is ambiguous. Watson, indeed, ou 
has interpreted the Dillenian plant as being the equivalent of our ; 
so-called mucronatum. Still, the ance in Hort. ai eee to : 
