BOREALES FLAVESCENTES 33 



the description agrees well with the plants of the middle west, which, 

 like Rafinesque's specimens, are hardly distinguishable from those of 

 the east; the name (1836) can not displace the earlier flavescens; (4) 

 V. leucarpum, with sessile oblong probably nerveless leaves, glomerate 

 spikes with the flowers in twos or threes, and white berries, from west- 

 ern Louisiana and probably Texas. In the more elongated leaves this 

 description agrees sufficiently well with the plant now known from Louis- 

 iana, though scarcely separable from the narrower-leaved eastern form 

 except in its fewer and more distant fruits. Dating from 1817, this 

 name also is more recent than flavescens. The last of the Rafinesque 

 species, (5) V. oblongifolium, with petiolate oblong or narrowly elliptical 

 somewhat 3-nerved leaves, very short spikes, and solitary oblong 

 "red"[ ?] berries, from Florida, can scarcely be compared with anything 

 known to me except the close ally of flavescens collected by Mr. Eaton in 

 the Everglades, from which region Rafinesque is not known to have seen 

 material. Like most of the preceding, this name dates from 1836, so 

 that it cannot be made to replace the earlier flavescens, though if it could 

 be shown to pertain to Mr. Eaton's plant it would have priority (under 

 Viscum) over the name now given to that Phoradendron. The only spe- 

 cies of Rafinesque of which I have seen specimens is labeled Viscum 

 serotinum, from the Cumberland Mountains of Pennsylvania and an 

 unspecified locality in Arkansas, in the Delessert Herbarium ; and from 

 an unspecified locality in Kentucky, at the Academy of Science of Phila- 

 delphia. 



A curious fact in the history of this species is that Pursh, who un- 

 mistakably meant the Viscum album of Walter, wrote flavescens Willde- 

 now [Swartz], instead of flavens Willdenow, with which West Indian 

 species he ambiguously identifies the mistletoe of the southeastern United 

 States which thus obtained its now long-established specific name through 

 accidental copying or deliberate emendation (for it is twice spelled 

 flavescens) of a preoccupied name. It may be noted, too, that Eichler 

 wrote flavum instead of flavens in the key of his masterly analysis of 

 the genus in tropical America. 



Though Willdenow had the present species in his herbarium (PL 25) 

 as representing the Viscum purpureum of Linnaeus, there can be little 

 doubt that Linnaeus himself intended this name to apply to the West 

 Indian mistletoe figured on plate 95 of Catesby's great work, which 

 obviously represents a Dendropemon, to which genus the Linnean spe- 

 cies is now, and properly, referred. 



PHORADENDRON FLAVESCENS ORBICULATUM Engelmann. 



Phoradendron flavescens orbiculatum Engelmann, Boston Journ. Nat. 

 Hist. vol. 6. p. 212. 1850. 



