108 PITTONIA. 
are changed again. My reasons for proposing two or three 
new genera have been given already. That the name Kry- 
nilzkia, with which people had barely had time to grow 
familiar, is to be dropped, is simply a historical necessity of 
the case, and therefore a thing for which I am not responsible. 
The genus Cryptanthe of Lehmann, identical with Kry- 
nitzkia of Fischer & Meyer, antedates it by nine years. Such 
is the fact which has ealled forth the present paper. And, 
since this and the two which have preceded it, are so 
essentially of the nature of a commentary upon the most 
recent of Dr. Gray's several pronouncements on this tribe of 
plants, it may not lie beyond our province to enquire why an 
‘author in so good repute for botanical learning should have 
left Cryptanthe quite unmentioned. Conjectures upon this 
point would be sure to rise in the minds of the readers of 
these comments, after what has been already stated as a 
fact. | 
It might be surmised that even the name Cryptanthe 
had escaped his notice; that he did not know the fact of its 
existence. Such things occur in the labors of the best of 
botanists. The genus was published originally in a cata- 
logue of the plants of a botanical garden. It was republished 
a few years subsequently in Linnea, a journal whose earlier 
volumes, replete with valuable matter appertaining to the 
botany of Western America, are but too often neglected. It 
was yet again reprinted in Don's Dictionary, another work 
cannot safely be left unreferred to. In this last named work, 
wherein the two then recognized species of Cryptanthe are 
described, the plant which was destined to figure as the type 
of Krynitzkia was still lurking under the genus Echinosper- 
mum ; but before the appearing of the tenth volume of De 
Candolle's Prodromus a change had come to pass, and, while 
in that volume Cryptanthe was reduced to Eritrichium, the 
former Echinospermum leiocarpum stood forth as typical of 
a genus, under the name Krynitzkia leiocarpa. Any one 
