TARAXACUM IN NORTH AMERICA. 227 
TARAXACUM IN NORTH AMERICA. 
The Dandelions of our vast and varied regions have hith- 
erto received but little attention from botanists. In Gray’s 
Synoptical Flora North America is credited with T. officinale, 
the most common of Old World species and the type of the 
genus, in five varieties, only one of which was supposed by 
that author to be peculiar to North America. 
At present T. officinale typical is well known to have 
become naturalized in almost all, even the newly settled 
portions of our country, while it is a fact more recently recog- 
nized, that another fine and well marked Old World species, 
T. erythrospermum, is thoroughly established all along the 
Atlantic slope from eastern Canada to Virginia. 
Indigenous species will probably be found sufficiently 
numerous, though perhaps only upon western mountain 
territory ; but the herbarium material is at present poor, on 
the whole, and insufficient for anything more than a tenta- 
tive elucidation of the genus. Many sheets of specimens 
exhibit no fruit at all, but only leaves and flowers; and 
while the outer or calyculate involucre seems to present the 
best array of constant characters for species, the fruit is always 
necessary. 
In my own more recent peregrinations on Taraxacum terri- 
tory, I have been careful—as every collector of these plants 
should always be—to obtain the perfectly ripe achenes ; and 
some of the most indisputable of the species here proposed 
are based on this complete material of my own collecting. 
It is greatly to be wished that certain northeast American 
forms, Nova Scotian, Labradorian, and from the Hudson's 
PITTONIA, Vol. IV. Pages 227-242, issued 5 Jan., 1901. 
