142 PITTONIA. 
and adjacent Maryland and Virginia is that distinguished 
by Le Conte specifically, under the name of V. congener; 
but there may be reason for thinking this a perfect equiva- 
lent of typical V. palmata, and I have no doubt Mr. Pollard 
has erred in referring it to V. obliqua. A characteristic of 
this species and the next, of which I find no mention made 
by any observer, is that the apetalous flowers produced in 
late spring and early summer are subterranean. 
V. oBLIQUA, Hill? I should not like to have put into 
print such a statement as this: * V. obliqua, Hill, well figured 
and unmistakable in his Hortus Kewensis.”! The figure 
does not half represent any violet that ever grew in any 
country. It is glaringly false in representing flowers erect 
on peduncles perfectly straight to the very summit! And 
. as for the leaves, one might safely challenge the whole fra- 
ternity of American botanists to produce from any part of 
our territory anything to match them. They are so entirely 
destitute of any special specific character as violet leaves 
that, separated from that violet rootstock and the somewhat. 
violet-like flowers, who would be able to decide that they 
were the leaves of a violet aud not those of some other 
cordate-leaved herb, or shrub, or tree? In a word, this 
figure in the Hortus Kewensis is, like most of Hill's plates of 
plants, about as vague and botanically useless a convention- - 
ality as an unbotanical draftsman could well perpetrate 
with a living plant before his eyes. 
This particular figure is not so unmistakable but that 
Pursh thought the plant now known as V. blanda to have 
been meant, and Dr. Gray himself at an earlier day was 
disposed to construe ‘it as meant for V. rotundifolia/® But 
such experienced and critical botanists as Michaux, Nuttall, 
and Le Conte ignore it altogether, as they may have felt 
justified in doing, inasmuch as both figure and description 
are in important points false even to the genus Viola. But 
1A. Gray, in Bot. Gaz. x 
? See Torr. & Gray, Fl. i. pes under f. rotundifolia. 
