PLATYSTEMON AND ITS ALLIES. 145 
species whose anthers are not short and manifestly adnate; 
here they are greatly elongated, oblong-linear or linear, and 
apparently innate. No other is, like this, devoid of any 
torus-rim. No other shows the leaf-margin otherwise than 
entire. This last character is not, however, very constant; 
for out of sixteen sheets of specimens examined by me in 
the course of this revision of the species, two present leaves 
all quite entire, while most of the others show some or all 
of the leaves dentate. But the actual type-specimen, col- 
lected by myself in Temecula Cañon, San Diego Co.,in 1885, 
is the only one yet seen by me in which the foliage is strongly 
and conspicuously denticulate. 
Coming now to the consideration of Platystigma I repeat 
the statement of my conviction that heretofore, in supposing 
our most common and familiar species with broad cream- 
colored petaloid filaments to be the type species of the genus 
I have erred, as have others. It was on these characters of 
the filament in this—characters so almost exactly those of 
the same organ in Platystemon—that we abandoned the 
former genus as not valid. 
Satisfied that Bentham’s type of Platystigma is a plant, 
how comparatively unknown, and possibly extinct where 
Douglas obtained it seventy years since, exhibiting truly 
filiform filaments, it follows that one must accept as a species 
hitherto unnamed and undescribed the familiar one. This, 
indeed, as it appears in the herbaria now somewhat copiously, 
easily resolves itself into several species, all new. 
Whenever a genus supposed to be monotypical is found to 
embrace several species, the validity of the genus is thereby 
strengthened; and having found that Platystigma resolves 
itself into a genus of perhaps a half-dozen species, and that 
Platystemon as now known is made up of four times that 
number, with no species on either side seeming any more 
transitional than were the originals themselves, there is no 
