REVISION OF CAPNOREA. 43 
should have been made in the Botanical Register, I can only ex- 
plain to myself on the hypothesis of the authors’ having drawn 
the corolla from a memory warped by the imagination that the 
plant was, what the collector of the seeds had said it was, a 
genuine tobacco plant. These are the words: “This curious 
species of Tobacco was raised from seed sent by William Bird, 
Esq., from the Rocky Mountains of North America” * 
“Upon the envelope of the seed it was stated to be the kind 
from which the Indians prepare the finest of their tobacco.” 
If this, in 1823, was a true record respecting the plants now in 
question, it seems 1 kable that neither any of the U.S. Govern- 
ment collectors who have been in the field with the plants, and 
who are supposed to look into the economic uses of native plants, 
nor of the several botanists and collectors who are resident upon 
Capnorea territory, have ever mentioned any such use of the 
_ herb by the aborigines. 
But not only does the early plate represent a plant with the 
corolla of a Nicotiana; the author was, in some unaccountable 
way, betrayed into describing the corolla as “obscurely lobed,” 
and as having a “plicate” æstivation; both of which state- 
ments are altogether false as applied to the plant which I, fol- 
lowing the lead of all « authorities,” have accepted as the type 
Hesperochiron or Capnorea. Rafinesque’s name for the genus, by 
the way, is coined in reference to the real, or supposed, use of 
the plant as a kind of tobacco ; or perhaps rather, as being an 
actual near relative of the genus Nicotiana. 
What particular species of the genus was in the mind of the 
author of that plate which seems so largely fictitious, I find it 
impossible to decide; and so, am utterly at a loss to apply at 
Present, the Rafinesquian binary name Capnorea nana. 
The species of the genus seem to fall into two natural 
groups; those of the one having a corolla with clear distinc- 
tions of Comparatively narrow tube and spreading limb, the 
“rgan as a whole being something between funnelform and 
Salverform, or even quite salverform, when fully expanded; 
those of the other presenting an almost saucer-shaped corolla, 
