PHACELIA BIPINNATIFIDA. 

 BIPINNATE PHACELIA. 



NATURAL ORDER, HYDROPHYLLACE^. 



PHACELIA BIPINNATIFIDA, Michaux.— A foot Or more high from a slender biennial root, 

 erect, paniculately branched, hirsute-pubescent and above mostly viscid and glandular: 

 leaves slender-petioled, green and thin, pinnately three to seven-divided ; the divisions 

 ovate or oblong-ovate, acute, coarsely and irregularly incised or pinnatifid ; the lower 

 short-petiolulate and the uppermost confluent : racemes loose, seven to twenty-flowered: 

 pedicels spreading or in fruit recurved: calyx-lobes linear, loose, longer than the 

 globular capsule: corolla rotate- campanulate, violet-blue, over half an inch in diameter, 

 with rather short rounded lobes and very conspicuous internal appendages: stamens 

 (bearded) and style usually more or less exserted. (Gray's Synoptical Flora of North 

 America. See also Gray's Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States ; Chap- 

 man's Flora of the Southern United States ; and Wood's Class- Book of Botany.) 



Dr. Gray's recent " Synoptical Flora of North 

 America," from which we have taken our botanical 

 description, fifty-five Phacelcas are described ; and yet less than 

 a hundred years ago not one was known. The first knowl- 

 edge of them seems to have been gained from Commerson's 

 celebrated voyage, when one which w^e now know as Phacelia 

 circijiata \N2iS, found in the Straits of Magellan. It was at that 

 time thought to be a Heliotrope, and Martin Vahl, a Danish 

 botanist, and one of the most celebrated of that time, named it 

 Hdiotropium pinnatum, under w^hich it is to be searched for in 

 the earlier writings of Willdenow and of some others. But 

 Jussieu, the well-known botanist of the end of the last century, 

 in his "Genera Plantarum " pubHshed in 1789, made a new 

 genus of it, Phacelia, w^hich name it still bears. That particular 

 species has the flowers growing in dense bunches or fascicles, 

 and this suggested the name, phakclos being Greek for a 

 fasiculus or bunch. This original species is very remarkable 



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