154 : PITTONIA. 
light abundance of characters, such as must have been seen 
by others, and even by myself long ago, but for that blind 
indifference that is born of our prejudices; such characters 
as, once seen and accorded the weight that is due them, 
must compel the recognition of half a hundred species as 
represented in various herbaria at this date. 
While all known forms of Platystemon are annual as to 
duration, and are equally at agreement as to the general 
type of foliage, yet even as to habit and foliage a very con- 
siderable number of marked diversities have now for 
the first been brought to light in this my first real 
examination of the plants. As to habit, some species 
are loosely branched, leafy throughout, and bear their 
flowers on relatively short peduncles. Other species are 
subacaulescent, with crowded basal leaves and long scape- 
like peduncles. The leaves of some are broad and obtuse, 
of others narrower, tapering and pronouncedly callous 
tipped. There are many sorts with herbage merely pilose- 
hairy, and also a considerable group in which the whole 
plant is crinitely soft-hairy; while a single species, endemic 
on an island in the sea is not at all hairy, but rather prickly. 
The peduncles in some are stout and rigidly erect; in others 
almost filiform; and, being erect after flowering in the greater 
proportion of the species, there are a half dozen in which 
they are nodding in fruit. The corollas in most are rotate, 
or at least saucer-shaped, their petals being sessile, but in a 
goodly number these organs are so distinctly narrowed to a 
shorter or longer claw that the expansion of their corollas 
is like that of a lily, and not at all that of a poppy or any 
other papaveraceous plants. The corollas, together with the 
stamens are commonly deciduous (though never fugacious as 
in many poppyworts), while in a multitude of other species 
they persist, along with the stamens, as a permanent cover- 
ing to the mature fruits; the carpels even in many an in- 
