THERMOPSIS CAROLINIANA. 43 



beneath. The stipules, which are perfectly persistent, are one to 

 two inches long. The flowers are three fourths of an inch in 

 length, on pedicels which are only one or two lines long, so that 

 the inflorescence is rather to be called a spike than a raceme. 

 The upper lobe of the campanulate calyx is merely emarginate. 

 The vexillum, as in the remaining species, is clearly shorter than 

 the other petals; the inside below the reflexion is dotted with 

 brownish ; the summit is rather deeply two-cleft, which is not shown 

 in the figure. The stamens persist after the petals fall, but usually 

 disappear before the fruit is grown. The fruit-bearing spike is 

 eight or ten inches in length, frequently ripening twenty to forty 

 crowded pods. The legumes are erect and closely appressed, 

 densely silky-villous, quite straight, about two inches long and a 

 fifth of an inch wide, obtuse at the base and almost sessile, 10- 12- 

 seeded, seldom at all constricted by the abortion of a part of the 

 seeds ; the valves are rather convex till the pod is quite ripe, when 

 they are nearly flat. Seeds oval, slightly reniform. 



When the first volume of the Flora of North America was pub- 

 lished, the authors knew of no species of this genus indigenous to 

 the proper United States. Three species are now known, from the 

 State of North Carolina, and are in cultivation at the Cambridtre 

 Botanic Garden. Two of them were proposed and characterized 

 by the Rev. M. A. Curtis, in Silliman^s Journal for January, 1843; 

 and the same assiduous and excellent botanist was also, probably, 

 the first to detect, in the Baptisia mollis of Michaux, the third 

 of our species of Thermopsis. 



Mr. Curtis discovered the entirely new and striking Thermopsis 

 Caroliniana in the summer of 1839, among the mountains of the 

 southwestern corner of North Carolina, near Pigeon river, in Hay- 

 wood county, and also on the Hiwassee river, in Cherokee county. 



