﻿Hall: Notes on Baeria and Lasthenia 113 



most important species both because of its abundance, particularly 

 in California, where thousands of acres of plain and foothill slope 

 are yellow with its bloom each spring, and also because of its 

 richness in forms. The description of a number of these forms as 

 species by earlier botanists was largely the result of attaching 

 undue importance to characters of the pappus. In my Compositae 

 of Southern California* I have attempted to point out the in- 

 stability of such characters and to arrange some of the forms into 

 natural groupings. Since the type of this species was gathered in 

 the vicinity of Bodega Bay on the coast of Sonoma County (lat. 

 38° 20' N.) some have been led to suppose that it was the broad- 

 leaved seacoast form. However, the original description reads: 

 "foliis . . . linearibus integerrimis, " and the plate published by 

 the authors of the species eleven years later illustrates a plant with 

 very slender acute leaves. A specimen determined by Meyer and 

 preserved in the Brandegee Herbarium at the University of 

 California is also of the slender upland form. It therefore seems 

 certain that the common form with linear-lanceolate acute leaves 

 and ovate acute involucral bracts is the original B. chrysostoma 

 and that the type specimens were collected not on the shores of 

 Bodega Bay but at some locality not under the direct influence of 

 the sea. The broad-leaved form has been described as B. hirsutula 

 Greene and since it differs in its broader and roundish somewhat 

 obtuse involucral bracts as well as in its leaves, it may be accepted 

 as a distinct species at least provisionally. 



§ Platycarpha 



The section Platycarpha forms a natural link between 

 Eubaeria, with which it agrees in its pappus characters, and 

 Dichaeta, which it closely resembles in habit, but it is unlike 

 either in its smooth campanulate involucre with carinately 

 thickened bracts. There is but a single species, B. platycarpha 

 A. Gray, since B. carnosa Greene is considered to be an inconstant 

 variant with usually entire leaves and more prominently carinate 

 bracts. There are two sheets of the latter species at the Gray 

 Herbarium, collected by Dr. Greene at Vallejo, April 14 and 16, 

 1883, and thus presumably a part of the type collection. The 



* Univ. Calif. Publ. Bot. 3: 169. 1907. 



