248 CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



coast form, where a part of the reticulation is unequally 

 and excessively developed, even — which occurs in no other 

 form — hiding the raphe. 



In some of the forms the minute roughness of the seeds, 

 which ordinarily is barely visible with a good glass, is un- 

 usually developed, tilling the reticulated spaces with an 

 ash-gray scurf. This is very common even in the form 

 about San Francisco, where the same capsule frequently 

 shows us seeds of the ordinary brown color and others 

 wholly or i^artially scurfy and gray. In the form described 

 as E. glyptosperma this scurf, unusually developed, seems 

 to spread not only over the intervals but over the ridges as 

 well. 



It was, I believe. Professor Coulter, in the Botanical Ga- 

 zette of August, 1879, who first called attention to the pecu- 

 liar variation of the cotyledons of Esclisclioltzia. It has 

 since, however, in a note appended to the description of E. 

 teyiuweda, been announced as a discovery of great impor- 

 tance that those "whose torus lack the spreading outer rim 

 have entire cotyledons, while those which possess that spread- 

 ing outer rim have them deeply bifid, i. e. cleft below the mid- 

 dle into two linear segments." How little reliance is to be 

 placed upon this character as an aid to classification, may 

 be seen from the fact that in a handful of germinating 

 plants gathered by Mr. Brandegee from a trench by the side 

 of the road near the Marine Hospital, the greater number 

 had bifid cotyledons, many were entire, some were bifid on 

 one side and entire on the other, some bifid on one side and 

 3-cleft on the other, and one was 3-cleft on one and -i-cleft 

 on the other side. These peculiarities are even more strik- 

 ing in the minute embryo, for there they are cleft nearly to 

 the base and so, as Professor Coulter remarked, apparently 

 often liave three, four, five or six separate cotyledons. 

 It will be readily understood that sufficient seeds for 

 proper investigations could not always be spared from 

 herbarium specimens, so that in the notes appended I 

 have often been obliged to draw conclusions from a few, 



