198 GRIFFITHS: NEW AND OLD SPECIES OF OPUNTIA 
origin is not known, but was grown from seed at our Brownsville 
station about 1910. The records regarding the origin of the 
packet of seed have been lost. It was sent us by some corres- 
pondent. It was hardy but difficult to grow out-of-doors at 
Brownsville, Texas, apparently on account of the excessive humid- 
ity, but we have been unable to grow it to fruitage in open ground 
at Chico, California, on account of low temperatures. 
The description here written is from specimens grown in a 
sash house in which the sash is slipped into a permanent frame- 
work on the advent of cold weather in autumn and removed as 
soon as danger of hard freezes is over in the spring. This arrange- 
ment also protects the plants from the excessive winter rains of 
this locality. So far as spination is concerned this species is more 
closely related to O. Scheeri A. Weber than any other known to 
me. It fruits poorly with us at Chico, although there is always 
an abundant blossom. Most of the ovaries fall soon after anthesis 
and the few that remain seldom ripen into plump, normal fruits. 
Usually a half dozen fertile seed is the most we get from the few 
fruits that mature. 
The type has been carried under our South Texas inventory 
No. 2836, ordinarily written S. T. G. 2836. 
Opuntia hispanica sp. nov. 
n erect to ascending, spreading, widely and almost divari- 
cately branched species, 3 m. or more high, with about an equal 
spread, making a globular-topped tree or, when grown from cuttings 
and not trimmed, a large hemispherical shrub—a tree headed on 
the ground; joints 14-15 x 30-41 cm., narrow, obovate, long, 
gradually tapering below, bright dark green, edges more or less 
notched with the raised areoles but smooth after one year; areoles 
obovaie, brown, becoming dirty black, 3 mm. long, enlarging in 
age to subcircular and 5 mm. in diameter: spicules not visible, 
yellow; spines very numerous, formidable, white with translucent 
tips, 2 to 6, mostly 3 or 4, porrect, diverging in all directions, 
flattened, twisted, not annular, the longer central 3-4 cm. and the 
others about 2 cm. with an occasional one only about 1 cm. long, 
increasing on old trunks to 10 or more and variously curved and 
bent, variable, some even 5 cm. long and porrect, when 4 usually 
2 on same level in lower part of areole and the other two one above 
the other directly above and between the first two ; buds blunt, 
short-pointed, dull dark greenish with only a little red, edges of 
