XVI. — An Arrangement of the Genera of Hepatic^. 

 By a. W. Evans. 



At the beginning- of the present century, the writers on Hepaticae 

 included nearly the whole of the present order JungermanniacejB 

 under the single genus Jungermannia. The only exception to this 

 rule was in the case of Blasia pusilla, which was usually kept as a 

 distinct genus ; but even this was reduced to a species of Junger- 

 mannia by Hooker in his " British Jungerraannieae '' finished in 1816. 

 The splitting-iip of this vast genus Jungermannia was begun by 

 Raddi (1820), who, in an account of some of the Italian Hepaticse, 

 arranged his species under a dozen or more distinct genera. He was 

 quickly followed in this work of division by S. F. Gray (182 1 ) and by 

 Dumortier (1822). Each of these three investigators worked inde- 

 pendently, and, in this way, gave rise to a mass of synonym}^ which 

 has since caused a great deal of confusion. The work of Gray 

 which remained overlooked by botanists for more than forty years, 

 has been especially unfortunate in this respect ; and this chiefly on 

 account of the generic names which he employed. In nearly every 

 case, these were derived from the names of persons, but, instead of 

 using the feminine termination, as is usual in such cases, Gray wn-ote 

 his names in the masculine, and published such genera as Bazzanius, 

 Kantius, etc. Most recent writers have, nevertheless, adopted these 

 names in an emended form, the termination being changed into the 

 feminine. 



In the Synopsis Hepaticarum (1844-47), most of the genera of 

 Raddi and Dumortier were acknowledged ; but, in some cases, the 

 names adopted for these genera were the later ones of Corda (1829) 

 and of Nees von Esenbeck (1833-38), so that they ought no longer to 

 be retained. Since the publication of this volume, there has been 

 no very comprehensive work on descrij^tive hepaticology. The 

 numerous shorter works on the species of limited regions or of 

 special groups, which have appeared from time to time, have, how^- 

 ever, contained a number of new genera ; and, since many of these 

 papers appeared in local periodicals or in the transactions of scien- 

 tific societies, they are now diflicult of access. 



Taking these facts into consideration, it has been thought well to 

 bring together, in an arrangement, the various genera which are 



