48 ROSA LUTESCENS. 
slender, unequal, pale brown, deflexed prickles and an 
almost equal number of sete; branchlets without 
prickles, but rough with glands and hairs. Leaves 
dense, dark green, discoloured in the autumn, quite 
free from pubescence ; stipulce very narrow, flat; pe- 
tioles unarmed; leaflets 7-9, oval, flat, simply serrated. 
Flowers pale yellow, solitary ; bractece none; peduncles 
and calyx naked; tube ovate, much shorter than the 
sepals, which are entire; disk not elevated; ovaries 
about 30; styles villous, distinct. Fruit large, ovate, 
black, with a fleshy stalk, crowned by the connivent, 
short sepals; pericarps large, crimson, rugged. 
Pursh was led into the error of including this in 
his North American Flora from its being known in the 
nurseries under the name of the Yellow American Rose, 
for which there does not appear to be any authority. I 
am much rather disposed to agree with the learned 
editor of the Botanical Magazine, in considering it a 
native of Siberia, with plants of which country its 
habit certainly agrees, and not at all with those of N. 
America. It appears to have been raised at Chelsea 
by Mr. Fairbairn, and from the original, still there, 
the plants of the gardens have most likely originated. 
I may hope to be pardoned for preferring, for so obscure 
a plant, the best of two names, although not the 
oldest. 
It is very distinct from R. spinosissima in its whole 
appearance, especially in its stout, straight rootshoots 
covered all over with bristle-shaped, dense prickles, 
and in the purple colour of its leaves in the autumn. 
The flowering shoots offer an excellent discriminative 
character, as they differ entirely from the branches in 
their arms, which are little more than tubercles tipped 
with a weak bristle, so that they might without much 
impropriety be considered rudiments of or imperfectly 
formed prickles. The peculiarity, however, is constant. 
