BOTANICAL LITERATURE. 249 
V. 
Contributions to American Botany.—xv. By Sereno 
Watson. Proc. Am. Acad. xxiii. pp. 249—287. 
1888. 
The important article in this one of Dr. Watson’s annual 
Contributions is that which, if it meet the approval of the 
botanical world at large, will banish the familiar name, 
Vesicaria, from the North American flora. In habit and 
pubescence it is certain that our large assemblage of plants 
that have been relegated to that genus differ extremely from 
their prototypes of the Old World. Three years ago the 
present writer determined upon making such a proposal as 
that now published in the American Academy Proceedings ; 
but he shortly abandoned the task, partly on account of a 
deficiency of materials of typical Vesicaria from Europe, on 
his side the continent, and partly in view of the occurrence, 
in South America, of a peculiar plant, quite intermediate 
between North American and European Vesicarie, the V. 
Mendocina (Philippi, in Linnea, xxxiii. 12), an important 
species whose existence Dr. Watson has not alluded to in his 
diseussion of the subjeet. But we were never of opinion that 
a new generit name would, in any case, have to be made for 
our North American plants. Nuttall, although very familiar 
with all these species, and their near allies, in the far West, 
did not consider that those in which the pods are inflated 
beyond the globose, and far out in the direetion of the didy- 
mous, were generically distinct from their neighbors which 
are just like them in aspect and everything else save the 
globose pods. And Nuttall was a close disciple of the elder 
De Candolle and others of their time, who made genera upon 
a minimum of characters. For the didymous-podded species 
he proposed a mer»ly subgeneric place and name. The name 
was Physaria; and Asa Gray, as long ago as 1845 raised it to 
