62 Coville The Technical Name of the Camas Plant. 



it abundantly in alluvial situations a few miles from St. Louis, 

 Louisiana [that is, St. Louis, Missouri], and more recently very 

 plentiful on the lowest banks of the Ohio." From this it is 

 clear that Nuttall did not get his specimens on the upper Mis 

 souri in his journey of 1810 to a point near the Mandan Indian 

 villages of North Dakota, and indeed the camas plant does not 

 extend so far east. The possibility that Nuttall had sent to 

 England living bulbs brought back from the Rocky Mountains 

 by Lewis and Clark may be dismissed by the lack of any direct 

 evidence to that eifect, as well as by the facts that none of Lewis 

 and Clark's plants are mentioned in Eraser's Catalogue, and that 

 Pursh, who went over their specimens and from them described 

 the camas plant, had not living specimens but only dried ones. 

 The plants which Nuttall sent to Eraser probably came from 

 the St. Louis, as opposed to either the Lake Erie or the lower 

 Ohio localities, for Eraser's Catalogue contains several other 

 plants labeled as coming from the vicinity of St. Louis ; none 

 from the other two places. 



This identification of Ker's Scilla esculenta as the equivalent of 

 Camassia fraseri, the plant of the upper Mississippi Valley re 

 gion, not only is satisfactory on geographic and descriptive 

 grounds, but it agrees with the identifications of Torrey* and 

 Watson, t and with the doubts expressed by Ker,J Hooker, and 

 Lindleyll as to its identity with the northwestern plant. The 

 name Scilld esculenta being, therefore, not available for the camas 

 plant, the name given it by Pursh in 1814, Phalangium quamash, 

 is the oldest. 



In the matter of generic names these plants have been well 

 supplied. Scilla is now considered a distinct genus, and Pha 

 langium is a synonym of Anthericum. Various authors recog 

 nizing the camas plant as not congeneric with either of these 

 have given it a new genus name, such as Sitocodium Salisb., 

 Lemotris Raf.. Bulbedulis Raf., and Camassia Lindl., but Dr. 

 Britton has recently brought to light a name older than any of 

 these, namely, Quamasia. This was published by Rafinesque in 

 1818 in the American Monthly Magazine, second volume, page 



* Pac. R. Rep. 4 : 147. 1857. 

 fProc. Am. Acad. 14: 241. 1879. 

 i Bot. Mag. 38 : t. 1574. 1813. 

 i Bot. Mag. 54 : t. 2774- 1827. 

 || Bot. Reg. 18 : /. I486. 1832. 



