82 LINN&US AS AN EVOLUTIONIST 



authority has ever seemed to think of this 

 as possibly a mere variety of A. ptarmica of 

 Europe; no more does Linnaeus; but while 

 according it full specific rank, and as if forget- 

 ful of all he had said in the Philosophia 

 Botanica upon such matters, he appends 

 to his technical account of A. alpina this 

 most evolutionistic suggestion: ''May not 

 the Siberian mountain soil and climate have 

 moulded this out of A. ptarmica?" 1 



Among the more elegant flowering plants 

 adorning the borders of subsaline marshes 

 southward in the United States is one which 

 Linnaeus denominated Hibiscus virginicus.* 

 It is exclusively North American, and even 

 here of somewhat restricted range. A similar 

 species, of distribution as limited and peculiar, 

 belongs to southern Europe, inhabiting the 

 shores of the Adriatic Sea. Now between 

 these two kinds of Kosteletzkya occupying 

 widely sundered continents, and neither one 

 much more than local, each along its own 

 little line of seaboard between these two 

 Linnaeus apprehends the existence of a more 

 intimate relationship than the most advanced 



1 An locus potuerat ex precedent! formasse hanc? Species 

 Plantarum, 2 ed., p. 1266. 



- Kosteletzkya virginica of more recent authors. 



