MS PITTONIA. 
S. FENDLERI, Gray, Pl. Fendl. 108 (1849). S. Nelsonii, 
Rydb. Bull. Torr. Club, xxvi. 483 (1899). Prof. Nelson ap- 
pears to have been the first writer to describe the habital 
peculiarities of S. Fendleri in its mature condition. That 
the species is emphatically multicipitous, forming usually 
a considerable and rather compact mat, as it were, of flower- 
ing stems and short leafy crowns, has been observed by me, 
since 1870; and I have seen and known it as such, all the 
way up from middle New Mexico to southern Wyoming. 
But this characteristic is one which Dr. Gray never inferred 
from the herbarium specimens, though many must have 
passed under his eye from which he might have drawn such 
inference. But there is another inference which, it seems to 
me experience should have taught both Mr. Rydberg and 
Mr. Nelson to make, and that is, that mu:ticipitous peren- 
nials must, in their early life, appear as simple and single 
individuals; and with me it is a matter of repeated observa- 
tion, that S. Fendleri, as well as the rest of the multicipitous 
species, at its first year of flowering, appears as a much larger 
plant than usual, more branching and more copiously flow- 
ering, the leaves more ample and quite undivided, and all 
from a single, simple leafy erown on a perpendicular root, 
with no sign or hint, as yet given, of the final, well matured, 
normal, and therefore typical multicipitous state. It is evi- 
dent to me, as I read again the original diagnosis of S. 
Fendleri,that what the author had before him was, the rank 
juvenile single condition of the species, such as Mr. Nelson 
certifies to as existing in the Engelmann herbarium and 
there representing it. Much of the confusion that has been 
made in Rocky Mountain Senecios has originated in igno- 
rance of the fact that all these matted species, propagating 
by seeds only, as all of them do, exhibit nothing of their 
ultimate multicipitous habit until after the year of their 
first lowering. Collectors, of course, gather in and distrib- 
ute specimens of the same species under these different 
aspects, and the closet botanist does with them what he can. 
