84 CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



minutely soft-pubescent : leaves small, on petioles shorter 

 than the lamina, deeply 5-cleft; the lobes 3-cleft: peduncles 

 short, deflexed, having about 2 white, or pinkish flowers: 

 calyx cylindraceous, 2 — 3 lines long, the tube shorter than 

 the erect lobes: ovary white-villous: berry dark purple, 

 velvety-pubescent but not glandular. — R. leptcmthum, var. 

 bracJiyanthum, Gray, Bot. Cal. I. 205. 



Open grounds in the northern part of California and re- 

 gions adjacent. A stout shrub, 4 — 6 feet high with coarse, 

 rigid, but gracefully recurved branches. It differs from B. 

 lep'anthwn not only in its shorter flowers, but in the velvety 

 pubescence which clothes not only both sides of the leaf, 

 but more markedly the fruit, even in its maturity. 



PENTACHiETA. 



This exclusively Calif ornian genus of small annual Com- 

 posita;, if it be accounted anomalous and refractory among 

 the Asteroidea?, including, as it most certainly does golden 

 yellow- and clear white-rayed species, has not the misfor- 

 tune to be made up of species feebly marked. Three or four 

 successive seasons of diligent observing and collecting of 

 them in all parts of the State where they grow, have failed 

 to show that any two species incline to run together. Of 

 the five now recognizable, none is better marked than that 

 one which, when first discovered, was naturally taken as the 

 type of a distinct genus, namely, Aphantochceta. The corol- 

 las of this are urceolate, the filiform tube widening quite 

 abruptly about midway, and contracting very perceptibly 

 under the small teeth of the orifice. The name Aphanto- 

 chteta was suggested' by the fact of the five bristles of the 

 pappus being reduced to mere rudiments. The very full 

 supply of specimens now in the herbarium of the California 

 Academy, having been brought in from numerous and widely 

 sundered localities by Mrs. M. K. Curran, my zealous, clear- 

 seeing and most efficient co-laborer in the field of California 



