148 PITTONIA. 
mate branchlets. Involucres turbinate, imbricated, the 
bracts narrow, nearly plane, herbaceous but with narrow 
scarious margins. Rays and disk both white, or the former 
reddish or at least often turning red in drying. Disk-co- 
rollas tubular-funnelform, 5-toothed but not deeply so, style- 
tips ovate, acutish. Achenes long and slender, manifestly 
compressed, hirsutulous. Pappusa single series of long and 
slender scabrous bright-white bristles. 
Plants of arid elevated plains and lower mountains from 
Colorado and Arizona southward into Mexico; flowering 
(like Townsendia) in spring and early summer. None of the 
earlier and more discriminating of our botanists conceived 
of these plants as possible members of the genus Asten; and 
the typical species, as the bibliography shows, was given a 
nominal place in each of several genera. Dr. Torrey in his 
day, and even Dr. Gray in his time, credited the plants with 
a double pappus, mistaking, as I suppose, some of the up- 
permost hairs of the achene, for a short outer pappus. But 
Nuttall, who studied the plant very carefully, as appears 
in the paper on Eucephalus, pronounced the pappus to be 
simple; and the only suggestion which I find of anything 
like an outer pappus is plainly an outcome of the hairiness 
of the achene. 
Considering the great diversity of forms in which the 
plant appears, it is hardly satisfactory to admit but a single 
species. . . 
L. ERICOIDES. Inula ? ericoides, Torr. Ann. Lyc. N. Y. ii. 
212 (1828). Chrysopsis ericoides, A. Eaton, Man. 5 ed. 174 
(1829). Eucephalus ericoides, Nutt. Trans. Am. Phil. Soc. 
vil. 299 (1840). Diplopappus ericoides, T. & G. Fl. ii. 182 
(1841). The type is a northern plant, of the hilly parts of 
Kansas and Colorado. It is low, scarcely woody at base, 
the branches clothed throughout with spreading heath-like 
linear leaves, these glanular and also both strigose and his- 
pidulous. This is strictly vernal in its flowering. In New 
