BULLETIN 
TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB. 
—_ 
OEnothera and its Segregates. 
By JoHN K. SMALL. 
The year 1835 marks a great crisis in the history of the genus 
OEnothera of Linnaeus. Edouard Spach then divided the genus 
into about a dozen, taking his characters from the flower and fruit 
The results of his observations were published in the Annales des 
Sciences Naturelles,* Histoire Naturelle des Végétaux,} and in his 
Monographia Onagrearum published in Nouvelles Annales du 
Muséum} the last named work containing a complete exposition of 
his conclusions. Although Spach’s work was considered good and 
reliable, his generic lines were not generally accepted, but were 
used to divide the composite genus O£nothera into sections. 
Spach, however, was not the first to see that OFnothera con- 
tained many generic types. In 1763 Adanson published Onagra, 
Rafinesque established Meriolix in 1818, in the same year Link 
Separated Chamissonia (not Chamissoa H.B.K.), and later several — 3 
genera were proposed by Nuttall. 
Between 1835 and the present time authors have at one time 
or another eliminated one or two genera from O£nothera, but it . 
_ Was not until 1893, when Rud. Raimann prepared the Onagraceae 
_ for Engler and Prantl’s Natiirlichen Pflanzenfamilien,§ that any 
systematic or logical subdivision of the genus into several genera — 
*(IL) 4: 163-168, : : 
+4? 347-379. 
¢CIIL.) 4: 321-407. 
$3: Abt. 7, 199-323. 
