WEST AMERICAN ASPERIFOLLE. 9 
creased, and their fruits began to be more attentively con- 
sidered, it was found that they must be excluded from Myo- 
solis. I apprehend that the difficulty which more recent 
botanists have experienced in dealing with them, has come of 
a too exclusive dependence upon certain of their fruit charac- 
ters. As authors of the early part of the century erred by 
looking to the corolla alone, so, it appears to us, those of fifty 
years later have gone astray by regarding too exclusively the 
surface and the insertion of the nutlets. Between the two it 
is hard to say which of these kinds of character is the less 
available for generical distinctions. I account of both as 
nearly worthless for that purpose, in so far as relates to 
species which were until recently referred to Hritrichium. 
Assuredly what seems to me to be the most forced and artifi- 
cial genus that has been proposed in this alliance is Echidio- 
carya, having every aspect and every character of Plagio- 
bothrys except that there is a stipe between the scar, or point 
of attachment to the gynobase, and the body of the nutlet. 
But precisely the same thing recurs in that group of species, 
very unlike Plagiobothrys, which, in the Supplement to the 
Synoptieal Flora of North America is neatly set apart as sec- 
tion Myosotidea of Krynitzkia, in one species of which, and 
that so near the Eritrichium Californicum of De Candolle as 
to have been hitherto confounded with it, the stipe is not only 
present, but even more distinct in its cut, though less elon- 
gated, than that which gave its supposed character to Echi- 
diocarya. We are, then, compelled to make allowanee here, 
in each genus, for every gradation between a perfectly sessile 
nutlet with scar depressed and hollowed, and a stipitate one. 
Professor Gray has indeed, in the Supplement referred to, 
remanded to Plagiobothrys two of the stipitate species which 
more modern one. Iam glad that, among contemporary authorities, one 
of Baron von Muller's great fame adopts the original and, I may add, 
the most appropriate and convenient ordinal appellative for these plants. 
It is one which, like Crucifere, Composite and others, has the literary 
advantage of not ending in that awkward combination of successive 
vowels which is a serious objection against many of the names of com 
paratively recent date. 
