Davis: LAMARCK’S EVENING PRIMROSE 529 
The sheet bears a label of Michaux with ‘‘Ameriq. sept.” On 
this label in the handwriting of Desfontaines is “‘ Oenothera suaveo- 
lens Hort. Paris.’’ Above this name has been written ‘‘ Oenothera 
grandiflora Poiret Encycl.,’’ and below, Spach wrote ‘‘Onagra 
vulgaris grandiflora Spach.”’ A second label bears the name 
“Oenothera grandiflora,’ probably in the handwriting of André 
Michaux. M. Gagnepain states that the specimens were im- 
ported as dried plants from North America. The chief interest 
in this sheet lies in the fact that Desfontaines evidently considered 
the specimens to be his own species Oenothera suaveolens. 
Both specimens are entire plants, the smaller about 3.5 dm., the 
larger about 5 dm. in height. They are unbranched and ob- 
viously dwarfed. The leaves are petioled as in grandiflora, but 
those of the smaller plant are much below the average size for this 
species. The stigma (s, PLATE 39) shown in the flower of the 
smaller plant seems to be above the tips of the anthers as in 
grandiflora. The pubescence of the stems and sepals, from notes 
of M. Gagnepain, appears to be somewhat similar to grandiflora; 
it is not that of De Vries’s Lamarckiana. 
There appear to be no characters on these plants that might 
not have been those of O. grandiflora Solander under very unusual 
or abnormal conditions. There is, however, little or nothing in 
these specimens that is typical of grandiflora, and apparently 
nothing that determines a relationship to any other Oenothera. 
It is hardly possible that plants so different from one another grew 
together in the same environment and it seems more probable 
that they were quite unrelated. They remain to us as the flotsam 
of the herbarium, plants of whose precise origin and parentage we 
know nothing. 
DIscUSSION 
The reader will have noted that throughout this paper the 
name Lamarckiana has been kept strictly for the plant that has 
come down to us from the cultures of De Vries, a plant well known 
to scores of botanists and grown in numerous botanical gardens. 
If this paper has shown that Lamarck’s plant in the gardens of 
Paris at about 1796 or earlier, the type of Oenothera Lamarckiana 
Seringe (1828), was a form of Oenothera grandiflora Solander (1789) 
the former name becomes a synonym of the latter. The Oenothera 
