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XXII. Sotne Remarks on the Plants now referred to Sophora, with 

 Characters of the Genus Edwardsia. By R. A. Salisbury, F.R.S. 

 and L.S. 



Read December 16, 1806. 



There is no genus in the vast natural order of Legioninosce, 

 which appears to me so great a disgrace to modern botanists, as 

 Sophora. Mimosa indeed, I presume, must also be divided ; but 

 the species referred to it have all a strict affinity to each other, 

 whereas Sophora, as it stands in the last edition of the Systema 

 Vegetabilium, contains at least eight genera, very few if any of 

 which will follow each other, in a natural series. Lamarck has 

 detached two of these heterogeneous parcels, joining with them 

 nevertheless some that are quite dissimilar in habit. Professor 

 Willdenow on the contrary, strange to tell, has not only re- 

 united these two genera of Lamarck's, but added to them a 

 third still more discordant, and nearer allied to Halodendrum. 



It is well known that our great master Linne only regarded 

 Sophora as a reservoir, into which he put every leguminous plant with 

 distinct stamina, that he could not refer to any other established 

 crenus. Those which I think ought to be separated, are, 1st, S. Mo- 

 nosperma of Swartz : a tree with large pinnated leaves, some- 

 what like those of Juglans, no stipules, terminal panicles of 

 flowers, and a broad hairy pod, containing one or two scarlet 

 and black seeds as big as a small hazel-nut : 2dly, S. Bavanensis, 

 Tomentosa, Occidentalism Japonica and Heptaphylla: these trees 



have 



