82 OsTERHOUT: WHAT IS GERANIUM CAESPITOSUM JAMES? 
James’s “ Account,’’ which was published in 1825, or two years 
later than the London edition. The name of the Geranium is 
changed from G. intermedium to G. caespitosum. 
The basis of our present understanding of G. caespitosum 
James is Dr. Asa Gray’s description in ‘‘ Plantae Fendlerianae,”’ 
p. 25. Dr. Gray was instrumental in sending out Professor 
Augustus Fendler with an army company, in 1846, to Santa 
Fe, New Mexico, and the collections on which the description 
is based were made by Fendler, in 1847, ‘‘on Santa Fe Creek, 
near irrigating ditches, at the foot of mountains; May to July; 
and six miles east of the Mora River: August.’’ Of this Geranium 
Dr. Gray gives a clear and carefully made description and says: 
“Dr. Engelmann had indicated it as a new species; but I am so 
confident that it is the species noticed and imperfectly character- 
ized by Dr. James that I venture to revive his name, which 
unless thus identified, must ever remain appended to the genus 
as a doubtful species, since no specimen of it exists in the col- 
lection made by him in Long’s Expedition.” 
In 1897, fifty years after Professor Fendler’s collection, 
Professor A. A. Heller and Mrs. Heller collected plants about . 
Santa Fe, and along Santa Fe Creek collected a Geranium, which 
Professor Heller published in 1898 as G. atropurpureum,* and 
he made this new species to take the place of Dr. Gray’s publi- 
cation, saying that the Geranium which Dr. Gray published was 
not G. caespitosum James. In his article Professor Heller says: 
“All the evidence seems to indicate that the real Gerauinm 
caespitosum is the plant now known as Geranium Fremontii, at 
least so far as applies to the plant collected by Fremont. What 
Fendler’s specimens from ‘bottom lands of the Mora river’ 
and Lieutenant Abert’s from the ‘Raton Mountains’ [plants 
cited in the original description] may be, I do not know, but 
they are hardly the same as Fremont’s specimens, and apparently 
different from G. atropurpureum.”” However, the type of G. 
Fremontii Torr., as published by Dr. Torrey in “Plantae Fend- 
lerianae,’’ page 26, was collected in the vicinity of Santa Fe by 
Professor Fendler. Of course it may not be identical in character 
with the plant collected by Fremont in the Black Hills, in 1842, 
as listed in the ‘“‘Catalogue of Plants collected by Lieutenant 
* Bull. Torrey Club 25: 195. 1898. 
