A New GENUS oF PoLEMONIACEA. 
~ 
An attentive study of that small assemblage of south- 
western desert annuals referred by some to Gilia, by some to 
Lzselia, and by others to Navarretia, has brought to light 
characters sufficient to establish them in generic rank; a 
view of their relations which the peculiar vegetative char- 
acters and general appearance strongly enough suggest. I 
find that hitherto not even their leaves have been correctly 
described. That which is merely the terminal odd segment 
of a regularly pinnate leaf has been treated as the whole 
leaf, while the real pinns, consisting as they do of several 
opposite pairs of long white bristles, or tufts of bristles, have 
. beenignored, at least asto their true morphological character. 
As I indicated long ago,! the calyx in the Polemoniacese 
is the floral organ which affords the best characters for the 
definition of genera; but here, as in other natural genera of 
the family, the most striking and perfectly constant pecu- 
liarities of this organ seems wholly to have escaped the eye 
of Asa Gray and others. And in no two genera within the 
limits of one and the same natural order are the calyxes 
more unlike than in these desert annuals and the genus 
Navarretia to which they have often been referred. 
The plants make a nearer approach to Lzselia than to 
any other genus; but Gray, after having at one time pro- 
nounced two of them to be only annual-rooted species of 
that genus,? afterwards retracted, and placed all three in a 
much more unnatural station, as a section Cheetogilia of the 
genus Gilia. But the Gilia of the Synoptical Flora, as I re- 
marked long ago, would not have been much worse, as a 
pretended genus, if the author had put into it the entire 
sensi of the Polemoniacese. 
: Pittonia, 
? Bot. Calif. posse ii. 466. 
