ESCHSCHOLTZIA. 207 
pretensions and in such admirable dress—Brewer and Watson’s 
first volume of the Botany of California—all the seven or eight 
species of Eschscholtsia which British botanists had grown in 
their gardens, and published with fine plates, were reduced to 
Chamisso’s original Æ. Cadifornica; and the one asset against all 
this lack of knowledge which the book betrays, is that of the 
establishment of one new species, Æ. minutiflora, the habitat of 
which is the desert region of the Great Basin beyond the borders 
of California. 
During the nine years next succeeding the publication of 
Brewer and Watson’s book of 1876, there is little evidence of 
any further investigation of Eschscholtzia. The authors of the 
book had known nothing of the fact that at least in some kinds 
the cotyledons are bifid; but in 1879 an editor of the Botanical 
Gazette had chanced to discover this interesting peculiarity and 
proceeded to announce it as a new discovery. But Spach away 
back in 1839 had observed this and recorded it as one of the 
characters of the genus. Dr. Engelmann in 1881, being on the 
very ground whence the original Eschscholtsia had come, found 
the plant, contrary to what was set forth in the new book, a peren- 
nial, and proceeded to publish this as a new fact. His paragraph 
is in the Botanical Gazette for that year. But to botanists 
resident in California this was no news. Even Chamisso im 
1816 had observed the fact, and in publishing the species had 
said that it is perennial. So also is that Oregonian species 
which, in Old England and New England, they had supposed 
to be Æ. Caiifornica,and because its roots were too tender to 
survive their winter’s, they had announced to be annual. 
In the spring of 1884 the present writer had already, at 
different times, spent five seasons botanizing in California, with- 
outyet having become specially interested in Eschscholtzia. But 
this year, investigating and collecting in a part of California 
before unvisited, he noticed growing along the borders of a 
wheat field an Eschscholtzia of very strange aspect. Its small 
flowers were most unlike those any known to be ex 
that genus. They were cruciform, the petals narrow and stand- 
