140 PITTONIA. 
True it was, that Bentham in proposing the two genera a 
asserted that in Platystigma the stamens also were very 
unlike those of Platystemon, that is, that the filaments were 
filiform, whereas in Platystemon they are so broad and flat 
and cream-colored as to appear almost like a set of narrower 
petals. Now since the time that Douglas collected these Cali- 
- fornian types, two generations of botanists and botanical 
collectors, gathering Platystigma from a hundred different 
localities in California, have found its flowers always pre- 
senting filaments dilated and flattened much as in Pla 
tystemon itself; and so we had come to believe that Bentham 
FN ae aE 
and his draftsman had both erred as to one of the important 
characters of Platystigma, namely the “ filiform filaments.” 
Somewhat recently, while recreating in tbe revision of 
early pages of my Manual looking to a second edition of 
that work, I was led to reconsider Bentham’s account of the 
genus Platystigma; and I became convinced that this careful 
botanist could by no means have had before him a plant 
with the broad, flat filaments—such as our herbaria now 
mostly exhibit—when he defined his genus Platystigma. I 
felt not a doubt that he had been in possession of what he 
described, and what the artist of the Icones Plantanum 8° 
clearly represented, a Platystigma with filiform filaments. 
Under this conyiction,I set to work upon all the herbarium 
material available, in hope of finding, somewhere, some- 
thing answering to the original account of P. lineare; and 
the result is, the detection of several well marked species of 
the genus Platystigma. 
A like inspection of hundreds of herbarium sheets of 
Platystemon has revealed as clearly or still greater number 
of species of that genus hitherto undescribed. And, as not 
only the pistils but also the stamens are always different m 
the two groups, I can not but propose the restoration of the 
two genera. 
