Observations on Conopholis Americana. 
(wiTH PLATES I-F¥1.) 
By Lucy L. W. Witson, Pu. D. 
Head of the Biological Department, Philadelphia Normal School. 
[Thesis presented to the University of Pennsylvania } 
I History AND LITERATURE. 
T is now nearly twenty-two hundred years since Theophrastus 
| Eresius (died 286 B. C.) appropriately bestowed upon a 
plant, which still bears the same name, the title of Orodan- 
che, literally peachoker. This name in extended form was 
afterwards applied to the whole order, which now includes 
some hundred and fifty species. Yet, in spite of the lapse in 
time, the family itself has been comparatively little studied. 
This seems doubly strange when one recalls their peculiar 
habits of growth, habits so well known and so characteristic 
that it was in describing them that Micheli in 1720 (“De 
Orobanche”’) first used the now common word parasite. 
The literature cited in Engler-Prantl’s ‘ Pflanzenfamilien” 
by Ginther Beck von Mannagetta in 1891 is given below.* 
To this should be added Chatin’s “Anatomie Comparée des 
Végétaux. Plantes Parasites,” (Paris, 1892). 
The absence of literature is especially noticeable in the case 
of the species which is the subject of this paper. With the 
exception of the mention of its gross specific characters in the 
various Floras and Prodromuses, most of which have been 
cited above, from the time of Linneus to the present, nothing 
* Wallroth, Orobanches Generis (1825); Vaucher, Monographie des Orobanches 
(1827); G. Beck, Monographie der Gattung Orobanche (1890), Bibl. Bot. Heft 
19; Baillon, Hist. des Plantes (1891); Endlicher, Gen. Plant (1836-1840); 
Reuter in D. C. Prod. XI (1847); Hooker and Bentham’s Gen. Plant. II (1873); 
Hooker, Flora Brit. Ind. (1885); Gray, Syn. Flora N. Am, IT (1886); L. Koch, 
Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Orobanchen (Heidelberg, 1837); Hovelacque, 
Rech. sur l'appareil veget. des Bign. Rhin. Orob. (Paris, 1838). 
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