A preliminary synopsis of the North American 
species of Amaranthus. 
EDWIN B. ULINE AND WILLIAM L. BRAY. 
In selecting work for the present year, our attention was 
called to the comparatively untried field of North American 
Amaranthacee. The only systematic work since Moquin- 
Tandon’s exhaustive revision of the order was that of Dr. Asa 
Gray in Proc. Amer. Acad. 5: 168-9, where he presented a 
short synopsis of our western Amblogynes, restoring the old 
generic name of Amblogyne Raf., which had been reduced to 
a section of Amaranthus by Bentham in Fl. Australiensis 5: 
212. Aside from this and an occasional new species by Wat- 
son, Torrey and others, we were left to the difficult task of 
disentangling the vague and conflicting statements of Lin- 
neus and Willdenow, and of setting them right as far as pos- 
sible with Moquin-Tandon and subsequent writers. Up to 
the present time our study has been confined to the genus 
Amaranthus. ! 
Geographically, an attempt has been made to embrace 
forms from Mexico and the West Indies whenever material 
and facts were at hand, though they may only meagerly rep- 
resent the forms that will yet be found in those regions. 
For the use of herbarium material, grateful ackhowledg- 
Fro. John Macoun, Dr. C. E. Bessey, Mr. John Donnell- 
Smith, Mr. Walter Deane and Mr. Jared G. Smith. Over 
1,000 herbarium sheets of the genus Amaranthus alone were 
to us in revealing the European conception of some of the 
older species. Mr. Hitchcock’s West Indian collection and 
Mr. John Donnell Smith’s Central American plants have been 
specially interesting in pointing out the probable line of 
prinkde that many of our introduced species have taken from 
their original tropical home. The late Dr. Thomas Morong’s 
