44 PITTONIA. 
had known it, and had said so from the first." This kind of 
erroris common with that class of closet botanists who will 
place no confidence in the statements of men in the field. In 
describing my E. Austine, the first thing I have said is that 
its root is perennial. I suppose that the specimen of it sent 
to Cambridge chanced to be one of a year old or less, in which 
the character of the root was not yet become conspicuously, 
perhaps not at all, apparent ; and this aspect of a single dried 
specimen is, with this author, reason enough for setting aside 
my statement, and placing the plant along with the annual 
kinds. But that is not the worst which has befallen this, 
which I regard as one of my very best species. It is placed 
as a mere form of an annual whose stems are scapose and 
quadrangular, while its own are leafy and terete! If the 
species had to be reduced it could about as easily have been 
put in with almost any other one of our ten or a dozen as with 
E. ceespitosa. However, by the reduction of E. Austinc and 
one or two other species more recently proposed, the number 
recognized by Dr. Gray is nine only: and so the neck is 
saved, but barely saved, to that criticism which he hastily 
passed upon my paper shortly after its appearance: “We 
would not readily believe that the genus Eschscholtzia com- 
prises as many as ten definable species.”* Concerning peren- 
nial Eschscholtzias I would here remark that I think we have 
a third, belonging to the interior of California quite exclu- 
sively, hence beyond my frequent observation. It is a very 
stout and erect plant, with magnificent corollas of a rich 
orange color throughout. I should have felt like giving it a 
place in my monograph could I have determined whether or 
not it is the E.-crocea of Bentham. The characters of a 
fourth species of the same root-duration are given in the foot- 
! See Linnzea, i. 554, published in 1826. 
* American Journal of Science for 1885, page 321. 
