l60 CENOTHERA MISSOURIENSIS. LARGE-FRUITED PRIMROSE. 



and showed that Sims' plant was really the same as his, and in- 

 sisted on his name, chiefly because " the specific name is inappli- 

 cable, as it never was found anywhere else but near St. Louis, 

 where Mr. Nuttall gathered ripe fruit of it, specimens of which I 

 have seen." Mr. Nuttall follows, in 1818, with his "Genera of 

 North American Plants," and sets aside both their names, and 

 describes it as G^. alata, for no other reason apparendy than that 

 it " more appropriately" represented the large-winged fruit (Fig. 

 3). Modern botanists, however, look on a name with no mean- 

 ing as quite as good as the "most appropriate," and adhere 

 stricdy to the law of priority of description, and this gives the 

 name of Sims' CEnothera Missoiiriensis as the correct one. 



Mr. Nuttall tells us that it was first discovered by Mr. Brad- 

 bury, thirty miles from St. Louis "on the Merrimac," meaning of 

 course the Missouri; but since then it has been found widely 

 extended throughout the Southwest. It was even collected, in 

 1862, by Hall and Harbor in the Rocky Mountains, but is prob- 

 ably rare so far north, as it seems not to have been collected by 

 subsequent botanists. 



The botanical name CEnothci^a is a very ancient one. Lin- 

 naeus believed it to be the "podded Lysimachia " of Theo- 

 phrastus, a very ancient Greek writer. Of modern botanists, 

 Sir William J. Hooker says it is from ''oinos, wine, and thera, 

 searching or catching, from the root having caught the perfume 

 of wine ; " but our American text-books tell us it is not that the 

 root catches the perfume of v^ine, but that those who ate the root 

 cauo-ht a ereater taste for wine. The moderns, however, catch 

 the taste for wine so easily that no herb is necessary to aid them ; 

 and, at any rate, whatever may have been the plant or the mean- 

 ing intended by the ancients, we may remember that it could not 

 have been one of our Evening Primroses, no matter how near 

 the relationship may be guessed to be, as the genus CEnothera 

 is wholly American, and, of course, was entirely unknown to the 

 Greeks and Romans. 



Explanations of the Plate.— i. One of several branches forming a plant. 2. An unopened 

 flower. 3. A seed-vessci nearly mature. 



