212 PITTONIA. 
to think or to do when assured that the most diffuse mat of a 
perennial and dichotomous Eschscholtzia begins its course of 
flowering and fruiting without a branch, and with one.or more 
scape-like peduncles rising from amid a bunch of radical 
leaves? A considerable proportion of the species do, in each 
individual plant run through such phases ; while in another 
set of species no individual passes, even in its fullest maturity, 
beyond a stemless and scapose development. Now in the her- 
baria, where a certain habital peculiarity may mean either the 
permanent state of a species and a specific character, or it may 
mean only a transitory phase and therefore of not the least 
diagnostic value, how is one to assort the specimens and learn 
what scapose specimens belong to scapose species, and what 
are but passing stages in the development of some freely braneh- 
ing kind? This is one of several hard problems that have 
perplexed me as a student of this genus during a number of 
years. The fact, however, that the species, be they few or 
many, fall readily into two groups by characters of the torus 
that are entirely constant—a fact that I saw clearly and gave 
to the public twenty years since—reduces greatly the difficulty, 
And, for a clew to the species in whatever stages of development, 
I seem to have found at last, after great labor in comparing 
almost countless specimens, that the leaves, the calyx, and when 
you have them, the pods and seeds may be depended on. 
As to the leaves of Eschscholtzia, the phytoptically blind will 
say that they are all alike ; all the same they differ in many ways 
and widely ; and their characters as to hue, as to pubescence, as 
to general outline; the relations of the divisions and the ulti- 
mate segments, as well as their forms, angles of divergence, ete., 
seem constant in each species, at whatever stage of growth. 
Equally to be relied upon are characters of the calyx. Not 
but that this organ is, in many a species, subject to consider- 
able differences of form according to its age and degree of 
development in the individual plant ; so that one may find, in a 
well grown plant full of buds, much diversity according to the 
stages of growth they are in. Still, in other kinds there is little 
