48 PITTONIA. 
and that, in the treatise under discussion, they are not alluded 
to. It may be the author has not read them ; but his silence 
is not always so to be construed where it is a question of work 
done in California by resident botanists. 
Some eighteen pages of these Contributions are occupied 
with an elaborate study of our Malvaces, an order in which 
no other living author is so well at home as Professor Gray, and 
in which his is the honor of having founded, almost forty 
years ago, two of our principal genera, Sidalcea and Malvas- 
trum. A new one, Horsfordia, of two species, is now pro- 
posed. It is a family of plants in which the present writer 
has done but little critical work ; outside of Sidalcea nothing 
at all; he is therefore only to aoc instruction, as occasion 
may offer, from these inviting page 
The proposed new order of Lu utnodendren will be a 
very small order with a very large name ; for the genera are 
only two, each of a single species. lu the matter of the 
ordinal name there was, videi hardly room for a choice, 
and so no complaint can be m 
Under the heading of Misellmea the number of new 
species is small as compared with that of former years, there 
being only eight or nine of them ; and the very first one we 
are seriously apprehensive will be but a synonym of Anemone 
Grayi, Behr & Kellogg, Bull. Cal. Acad. i. 5, which we all 
smiled about at first, whieh Dr. Gray promptly passed ad- 
verse sentence on, but which the present writer has since felt 
forced to accept as a good species and accord a place in his 
manuscript of the Handbook of the Botany of Western North 
America. Even on Mt. Tamalpais, in sight of San Francisco, 
the flowers are bluish often, and the transition as regards 
color, is no doubt gradual between the form in this locality 
and that of the more remote north where the flowers are 
sometimes of so beautiful a blue. But the author of A. Ore- 
gana has now, as usual in such cases, observed strict silence 
regarding this at least possible species which, in spite of its 
Californian authorship may yet, as I have intimated, fairly 
reduce to a synonym the name A. Oregana. The named 
Baa oe a Me 
