no COTYLEDON NEVADENSIS. NEVADA COT\XEDON. 



side by side and used as edgings to carpet beds and other artifi- 

 cially arranged plots of flowers, In which they give an unique 

 character no other class of plants could give so well. They were 

 not pardcularly valued for their flowers, and hence did not force 

 themselves on the florist's attention. Like the " Homeless " of 

 the poet, they had to be sought for by the curious in the col- 

 lections of those who loved nature for its own sake, and its worth 

 proved an over-match for beauty. When our American poets 

 turn their thoughts on American flowers, as so many Europeans 

 have to theirs, there will be many pretty pages to read and les- 

 sons like these to learn from our own wild flowers. 



Our Nevada Cotyledon may not grow exactly in places made 

 dusty by " rude feet," but it inhabits dry stony places, where few 

 would think of looking for a pretty flower. The specimen from 

 which our drawing was made grew on the dry rocks at the head 

 of the Yosemite Valley, and below the celebrated Falls of that 

 name, in which place both Dr. Torrey and Dr. Gray had pre- 

 viously found it. Dr. Bigelow, the botanist of the early Pacific 

 Railroad Survey, in the Report of 1856, notices it as being col- 

 lected by the party on rocks and hillsides in Sonoma, and at 

 Knights' Ferry on the Stanislaus river. Torrey and Gray, in 

 the "Flora of North America," published in 1840, note it as 

 having been found by Nuttall in San Diego, but do not say 

 under what conditions of growth it was found. But the whole 

 tribe like high and dry places, and are emphatically rock-plants. 



In the works last named it is spoken of as an EcJieveria, and 

 Nuttall, whose collections from San Diego first made botanists 

 acquainted with it, named it Echcvcria lanccolata. De Candolle 

 thought there were distinctions sufficient to divide the genus 

 from the old Cotyledon, the chief difference being that, while the 

 petals were sHghdy united at the base, so that they would all 

 come off together when mature as a monopetalous corolla in Co- 

 tyledon^ in Eeheveria they are wholly separate from one another, 

 and it would be called strictly a five-petalled flower. He named 

 the new genus as he supposed it to be, as he tells us, in honor of 



