STUDIES IN THE CRUCIFER. 119 
in 1812;! but the weight of his authority as a keen empiric 
was quickly overborne by that of the great newly risen advo- 
cate of natural classification, A. P. De Candolle, who strongly 
reasserted the rank of the genus suppressed by Brown? 
After this, for forty years or more Dentaria found again that 
almost or quite universal acceptance which had been ac- 
corded to it in earlier times; then Bentham came out in 
favor of all that Crantz in his day, and Brown in his had 
advocated? Now again since Bentham thirty years have 
elapsed, and still very few botanists have shown willingness 
to accept the view he advocated. Asa Gray, although per- 
sonally inclining to favor any proposition of this kind made 
by Bentham, always held the two genera to be distinct. 
The great majority of active botanists have had their 
training in Europe, or else in the eastern part of North 
America, and in neither of these fields is there anything to 
suggest a doubt of the perfect validity of Dentaria. The 
several Dentaria species of both these regions are of so pro- 
nounced a generic habit and aspect, that scarcely any group 
of Cruciferee is more clear-cut in its seeming distinctness 
from Cardamine and every other. Cardamine itself is not at 
all so unlike Arabis or Sisymbrium or Nasturtium in its whole 
bearing asit is unlike Dentaria; while this last-named group 
as no analogues, or manifest allies, as to habit. They are 
peculiar in their dry-sylvan habitat, fleshy rootstock, the 
absence—or at least the scarcity—of radical or basal foliage; 
they are naked as to foliage except the ample and almost in- 
volueral pair, or whorl, of leaves holding place about mid- 
way of the stem; the ample corollas are not evidently eruci- 
for m in expansion, the petals diverging only gradually, and 
to the bell-shaped. They seem, indeed, to be about as far 
removed from the Cardamine type as Anemones of the A. 
nemorosa group are separate from the low and upright species 
1 Hort. Kew. 2 ed. iv. 100 (1812). 
2 Syst. ii. 271 (1821). 
? Benth. & Hook. f. Gen. i. 70 (1862). 
