CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE GRAY HERBARIUM OF HARVARD 

 UNIVERSITY, NEW SERIES, No. XVI. 



Presented by B. L. Robinson, March 8, 1899. Received March 15, 1899 



I. — REVISION OF THE GENERA MONTANOA, PERY- 

 MENIUM, AND ZALUZANIA. 



By B. L. Robinson and J. M. Greenman. 



No considerable collection of Mexican or tropical American plants 

 has been received at the Gray Herbarium in recent years, which has 

 failed to contain one or more new or otherwise exceptionally interesting 

 Compositce of the subtribe Verbesinece. The repeatedly experienced 

 difficulty of properly placing such plants — due on the one hand to the 

 imperfect characterization of many of the earlier described species, and 

 on the other to the somewhat vague generic lines — has suggested the 

 revisions here presented. While by no means exhaustive treatments, 

 they correlate the hitherto scattered results of considerable recent work 

 on this group, and furnish, in the light of the fuller material now avail- 

 able, a new critique upon many of the earlier species. Of the genera 

 here treated, Montanoa has long been the most difficult, largely by reason 

 of the brief and obscure descriptions of many species, chiefly those of 

 Schultz Bipontinus, a writer whose long and intensive study of the Com- 

 positcB led him to a far more critical discrimination than intelligible 

 description of species. Probably no one in recent years has given more 

 attention to the work of Schultz than the late Dr. F. W. Klatt, who 

 examined many of his types, and, when unable to secure duplicate speci- 

 mens, recorded his observations by excellent sketches and notes. The 

 recent acquisition of the Klatt collection of Compositce by the Gray 

 Herbarium has rendered it possible to interpret many of these doubtful 

 plants with greater precision than could heretofore be effected on this 

 side of the Atlantic. Others, however, are still obscure, and must remain 

 so until their types can be examined in scattered European herbaria. 

 Even when this can be accomplished, it is a question with how much 

 practicality or justice such species, many of which are merely nomina 

 subnuda, can be revived to displace fully and carefully characterized 



