4 
92 PITTONIA. 
altogether resembling a small F iearia. I gladly dedicate 
the species to the discoverer, who has already done excel- 
lent service to the systematic and economic botany of the 
remote Northwest. 
RANUNCULUS ELLIPTICUS, Greene, Pitt. ii. 110. In the 
Flora Franciscana, on account of an apparent blending of 
this species with R. glaberrimus on the eastern borders of 
California, I reduced it to the rank of a variety. But this 
was not wisely done. Mr. Sonne, whose specimens seemed 
to show close intergrading between the two, has more re- 
cently detected a character by which R. ellipticus is clearly 
in all its forms distinct. Its peduncles are recurved after 
flowering. This, in addition to the other characters which I 
was obliged to concede to it, even as a variety of R. glaber- 
rimus, are abundantly sufficient to sustain it in the rank of 
a species. And that this Rocky Mountain type was long 
ago about to be received bv Asa Gray as a new species, I 
find evinced in a letter which he wrote me twenty-six years | 
Since; a suggestion, of which I had retained no recollection 
at the time of my publishing the species. I had sent him 
this plant from Colorado, in 1870, under the name of B. 
glaberrimus; and he replies: “What I so called in [the 
enumeration of] Parry, ete. There is something about it to 
be said hereafter. I want it in fruit!” Any one familiar 
with Dr. Gray as a correspondent will recognize this as his 
OF method, intimating that a probable new species is in hand. 
a 
y 
But he afterwards committed the error of referring this plant 
to what he called R. alismefolius; and it was actually seni 
from Cambridge to Kew as representing the plant now 
known as R. alismellus! The ticket there is in the hand- 
writing of the late Mr. Sereno Watson. 
DELPHINIUM NELSONII. Obscurely puberulent; erect, 
slender and simple, 1 to 11 feet high, from a dense cluster 
of thick tuberiform roots, these not deep-seated but very 
near the surface of the ground: leaves few, the lowest long- 
