OF ARTS AND SCIENCES : JUNE 14, 1870. 243 



the later work is a development. He had reason to believe 

 that the omission would be supplied. 



The Vice-President and Professors Parsons and Holmes 

 were appointed a committee to consider whether the cost of 

 printing Professor Lovering's memoir upon the Aurora Bo- 

 realis could rightly be defrayed from the Rumford Fund, and 

 also what disposition should be made of any proceeds which 

 might accrue from the republication by the Academy of Count 

 Ptumford's works. 



It was voted to appropriate one hundred and fifty dollars to 

 be expended by the Library Committee, and three hundred 

 and fifty dollars to be expended by the Committee on Publica- 

 tions. 



Mr. Porter C. Bliss made a communication on the Ethnol- 

 ogy of the Indian tribes of the southern part of South Amer- 

 ica. 



The President read by title the following papers : — 



1. Reconstruction of the Order Diapensiacecc. By Asa Gray, 



The name of this group was first used by Link, for a tribe of Com 

 volrulacece, — which was wide of the mark. But the order was founded 

 by Lindley in 1836 (Introd. Nat. Syst. ed. 2). The two genera and 

 species of which it was constituted, however, have on the one hand 

 been appended to Ericaceae, as by Endlicher and Dr. Hooker, or on the 

 other referred to Polemoniacece, as by Don, Fries, and Alph. DeCan- 

 dolle. Decaisne, indeed, keeps up the order (Decaisne and LeMaout, 

 Triiite Gen. Bot.) ; but as he intercalates it between the Pyrolece and 

 Vaccinece, admitting those and kindred groups as orders, his view coin- 

 cides with that of Endlicher and Hooker. In the second and subse- 

 quent editions of the Man. Bot. N. United States, I had followed the 

 other course. But, after an attentive study of the Polemoniacece of the 

 Northern hemisphere, I can no longer recognize the relationship. The 

 plants in question have neither the gamophyllous calyx, nor the convo- 

 lute aestivation of the corolla, nor the usually three-cleft style, nor the 

 hypogynous disk, nor the pretty large embryo with flattened or folia- 

 ceous cotyledons of Polemoniacece; nor do the latter anywhere show 

 an approach to the stamens of Diapensia. That these points of differ- 

 ence from Polemoniacece are all, with one exception, points of agree- 



