89 
OBSERVATIONS ON THE COMPOSITAl.—IX. 
By Epwarp L. Greene. 
In continuing the expression of my views of the generic 
relations of our homochromous asteraceous plants, I would 
first invite attention to another species which is very much 
out of harmony with Solidago, in which genus Asa Gray 
always insisted upon placing it, notwithstanding that it has 
no ray-flowers at all, and that all its corollas are purple, or 
at least white changing to purple in age. I refer to the 
plant first described by Stephen Elliott as Aster? discoideus. 
Elliott was the original discoverer of it and no other author 
seems yet to have given it a full and satisfactory description, 
some of the more important points of which description 
were entirely ignored by Gray, in the Synoptical Flora; 
the color of the corollas being left wholly unmentioned by 
him, which is equivalent to saying that they are yellow, as 
in Solidago generally; though he admits that even the 
pappus is often tinged with purple. Elliott, while referring 
the plant doubtfully to Aster, says that he at first thought it 
to be of a new genus, but was afterwards “induced for the 
present to arrange it here” (in Aster); but it did not occur 
to him that it could possibly be placed under Solidago; 
neither did DeCandolle see it in any other light than that of 
something referable to no other established genus but Aster. 
In mode of growth the species is doubtlessly solidaginoid, 
though no Solidago has precisely such foliage, or such 
inflorescence. It clearly is farther removed from Solidago 
than is the genus Brachycheta; and, by its short and 
clavellate pappus, and deeply cleft corollas, it is quite as dis- 
tinct from Aster. I should therefore receive i readily in 
the rank of a genus, to be called i 
a, 
BRINTONTIA. eats 
B. discoidea. Aster? discoideus, Ell. Sk. ii. 358 (1824); 
DC. Prodr. v. 247 (1836). Solidago discoidea, Torr. & 
Gray, FI. ii. 195 (1842). 
Eryruega, Vol. III., No. 6 [1 June, 1895]. 
