PLATYSTEMON AND ITS ALLIES. 139 
short rigid sharp hairs, the margins in the entire ones closely 
ciliolate with more slender ones, the surface of all pervaded 
by a few slender light-colored feather veins: panicle short, 
of a few slender spreading or recurved secund racemes; 
pedicels of the oblong heads covered with imbricated bract- 
lets; involucral bracts of a rich yellow, in a few series, 
oblong, obtuse, glabrous or at tip delicately ciliolate: rays ` 
apparently 1 or 2 only, or wholly wanting: achenes 
pubescent. 
Dry hills about Weatherford, 10 Oct. 1902. 
PLATYSTEMON AND ITs ALLIES. 
Eleven years ago, in the Flora Franciscana the genus 
above named was set forth as including both Platystigma 
and Meconella; and in the Bay Region Manual, two years - 
later, I renewed the expression of this view, holding that 
when two specific types are so much alike in aspect and 
character and all else except their pistils and carpels they 
are not, in a natural system of classification, to be received 
as types of two genera. 
The two Californian types which during the last half of 
the nineteenth century were everywhere accepted and with- 
out question, as representing, the one the Platystemon, Cali- 
fornicus of Bentham, the other his Platystigma lineare, have 
often been seen to be so exactly alike in habit, foliage, pub- 
escence, color of flowers and form of stamens, that the best 
botanists, in order to be able to say which was Platystemon 
and which Platystigma, would be obliged to examine the 
Pistils; even these, at the flowering stage not always so very 
different at first glance, as they are destined to appear whe 
mature, : 
