GENERA CONFUSED UNDER BRODI.EA. 133 



exceptional, but which we who see every year hundreds of 

 luxuriant specimens know to be universal. This, like B. volu- 

 bills, attains its best development when growing in the edges 

 of thickets where its tall scapes obtain their needed support 

 by taking a zigzag course up among the branches of the 

 buslies. It is a peculiar species in this respect, and more 

 peculiar still in the racemose inflorescence. 



^^ Fertile stamens 6. 

 -\— Perianth-tiibe constricted above. 



B. PULCHELLA. Scape 2 — 4 feet high: flowers umbellate: 

 perianth as in B. coiigesta: appendages of filaments erect 

 or somewhat convergent over the anthers. Hookera piilcJiella^ 

 Salisb. Parad. ii. t. 117;Britten, 1. c. excl. syn. : B. congesta; 

 B. capitata in part of several authors (?). 



The plant which I here quite confidently take for the real 

 Hookera pulchella, has not been long known to me; but I 

 had named and diagnosed it as a new species before having 

 seen the figure in the Paradisus. It is distinguishable from 

 B. congesta, wdth which it grows, by its umbellate inflores- 

 cence and hexandrous flowers, and from B. capitata by its 

 differently shaped perianth and ^Bstival flowering season, 

 that species being early vernal. Its existence, as a species, 

 is certified to me, first, by my own field observations and 

 comparisons, made at Berkeley, where it grows and flowers 

 with B. congesta, or even a little later than that, and fully 

 six weeks after B. capitata has passed out of the field. I 

 have also a single specimen from the Yosemite Valley, ob- 

 tained late in June, 1886, by Miss Brunton. The hexan- 

 drous character of Salisbury's plant has been a stumbling- 

 block in the path of all authors from his own time down to 

 the present; for every one has inferred from the close, in- 

 deed quite perfect, similarity of the perianth, that this and 

 Sir J. E. Smith's B. congesta were identical; but that is 

 plainly triandrous. Salisbury himself, believing them to be 

 the same, was able to reconcile in his own mind the dis- 



