296 PITTONIA. 
American type, all the information that American botanists had 
concerning it they gained by way of England; and Asa Gray's 
presentation of the genus in the Torrey and Gray Flora in 1838, - 
was but a compilation from English authorities; though he re- 
marks that Æ. Californica and E. crocea “ are now common in our 
gardens,” and might have added that they had found their way 
there, not from California directly, but only by way of English 
gardens. Being in 1838 without facts on which to base an 
opinion of his own as to the number of species in the genus, he 
adopts Chamisso’s original one and the four that Bentham had 
then recently added, making five in all. It is remarkable in 
the history of Æschscholtzia that during the first fifteen years 
after the publication of the genus, more work was done upon it 
than during the succeeding half-century. After the appearing 
of Bentham’s paper of 1835, very little was added to the know- 
ledge and understanding of these plants until the year 1885; 
and this notwithstanding the fact that early in that fifty- 
years period, intercommunication had been opened between the 
States and California, so that it was no longer needful for 
American botanists to ask their English colleagues for inform- 
ation about Californian plants. But, despite all these advan- 
tages, scarcely an item of new knowledge had been gained by us, 
and the old had been in so far lost that American authority as it 
spoke in 1876, made next to no account of Bentham’s work, 
reducing all his and Lindley’s species to the original £. 
Californica; just the kind of result that usually follows, not 
advancing knowledge, but deepening ignorance. 
Bentham himself in the Plante Hartwegianae in 1849 had felt 
and expressed a rising doubt as to whether the species of this 
genus were more than one; and authors are apt, in later years, 
on some hasty review of an earlier piece of work, to doubt its 
validity. But again in 1862, as if having now gone carefully 
over the old ground, Bentham reasserts it, in the Genera Plant- 
arum, that the species are four, if not five. Nevertheless, four- 
teen years later, in what I have long viewed as the weakest of 
all books of American botany that ever appeared under so great 
