OPEN LETTERS. 



WEBB'S "STUDY OF SPIRAEA. 



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In the June number of the Botanical Gazette there appeared a paper 

 by Mr. J. E. Webb under the title •' A morphological study of the flower and 

 embryo of Spiraea." InlooRing through it I noticed that the illustrations of the 

 sections of the flowers represented obdiplostemonous flowers with but two car- 

 pels and a simple raceme, all characters which do not agree with the true 

 Spiraeas. It became apparent, therefore, that the paper did not deal with 

 Spiraea japonica Linn, f., but with Astilbe japonica Gray {Hoieia japonica 

 Morr. and Decne. Spiraea japo7tica Hort.), an herbaceous plant belonging io 

 the Saxifragaceae. Unfortunately it does not happen infrequently that mor- 

 phological and physiological researches are based on wrongly named plants. 

 Of numerous similar instances I shall mention here only one I came across a 

 few days ago in the Botanische Zeitung (47 ; 629, 1889), where a paper by J. 

 H. Wakker on ** Bau und Dickenwachsthum von Abriis precatoriiis " is pub- 

 lished. The figure on the plate of a flattened stem and the mention in the 

 text of '*der Gattung Phaseolus ahnliche Blatter" left little doubt that the 

 plant under consideration was not Abrus precatorius but Rhynchosia phaseo- 

 loides, which is sometimes confounded with the former on account of the smii- 

 larity of the seeds. The article was reviewed in Just's Botanischer Jahresbe- 

 richte without the error being noticed. As also in the present case Webb s 

 pa{)er has been mentioned in other journals without attention being drawn to 

 the misleading names, I thought it advisable to point out that the paper chiefly 

 deals with Astilbe, and thus refers mainly to Saxifragaceae, and the Spiraea 

 japonica there cited should be changed to Astilbe japonica Gray, and the Spi- 

 raea astilboides to Anmcus astilboides, while Spiraea salicifolia, with only one 

 illustration, will remain as the correct name. — Alfred Rehder, Arnold 



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Arboretum, 



246 [SEPTEMBER 



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