8 PITTONIA. 
peratum, yet of most peculiar aspect, on account of its lacini- 
ate leaflets: but the best specifie character is that of the long, 
several-seeded legume. 
SOME WEST AMERICAN ASPERIFOLLE. 
Our commonest Pacific American *Asperifolize have been 
hitherto a fruitful ml source of synonymy ; the fate of each 
species having heré to be published first as of one genus, 
then of another and another ; all of which implies either that 
the genera are hard to define, or that the true generic charac- 
ters which the plants furnish have been overlooked. In deal- 
ing with the earliest known species of them, the Old World 
botanists erred very naturally and excusably in applying to 
them those principles upon which the classification of the Old 
World Asperifoliz had been based. In Europe and in Asia 
the genera have flora] characters, the corolla itself furnishing 
some of the best: but not so here where, running through 
a long list of more than one hundred species which, by their 
differences of habit would seem likely to represent five or six 
good genera, the corolla is substantially one thing, the dif- 
ferenees being so very slight as to teach that the diagnosis 
of that organ may almost be omitted as superfluous in descrip- 
tions whether of genera or of species: and the corolla in all 
this vast assemblage of Western North and South American 
plants is that of the mainly Old World genus, Myosotis: 
hence the common error of early writers who placed them 
as species of that genus. When the number of them was in- 
- Ordinal names in botany, no less than the generic and specific ought; 
it seems to us, to be received according to priority. The one here writ- 
ten was proposed by Haller, accepted by his contemporaries, including 
such men as Dillenius, and has never yet been quite displaced by the 
more recent Jussiæan name Borragineæ; for even that most eminent 
writer on the order, Lehmann, continued always to use the older name, 
notwithstanding that the De Candolles in their great general work, des- 
tined to wield such wide and lasting influence, chose to support the 
