safford: cosmos sulphureus • 619 



vicinity of Guadalajara, Jalisco; and five years later he collected 

 it at Culiacan, Sinaloa, bringing back with hun from this locality 

 seeds from which plants were propagated at Washington. The 

 account of its introduction into cultivation in the United States 

 is told by Dr. J. N. Rose in Garden and Forest for December, 

 1895, where an excellent figure of it was published. It is now 

 represented in the United States National Herbarium by speci- 

 mens from many other parts of Mexico: from Durango, Sonora, 

 Tepic, Colima, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Morelos. It is 

 interesting to note that this species, observed by Gemelli-Careri 

 centuries ago while traveling between Acapulco and Cuerna- 

 vaca, has been collected at both of these terminals, at Acapulco 

 by Dr. Palmer, in 1894, and at Cuernavaca by Dr. J. N. Rose, in 

 1902. Seeds of this classic dye-plant of the Aztecs were recently 

 obtained by the writer, and he now has a number of vigorous 

 young plants of the true xochipalli growing in one of the green- 

 houses of the United States Department of Agriculture. 



DESCRIPTION 



Cosmos sulphureus is a tall, rank, pubescent annual composite, 

 growing usually about four to seven feet high, with stems as 

 thick as the thumb and bipinnatifid or tripinnatifid leaves, not 

 unlike those of the common Artemisia vulgaris in form. The 

 flower heads, borne on long slender peduncles, are subtended by 

 a calyx-like involucre composed of two series of eight bracts 

 each, the outer bracts linear and green, the inner broader and 

 scarious. The flowers vary in color from bright orange to deep 

 reddish orange. The heads are composed of eight broadly ovate 

 ray-flowers, three-toothed at the apex, spreading at right angles 

 to the axis and soon falling off, and fertile tubular disk flowers 

 forming a compact erect cylindrical bundle. The exserted an- 

 thers are black with orange tips, and the style is branched, ter- 

 minating in two slender tips. The fruit is a linear akene nearly 

 an inch long, including the slender barbed beaks, and the pappus 

 consists of two shghtly hispid awns. 



