148 
it originally came from South America is erroneous; Plumier 
does not say in the Plantarum Americanarum just where the plant 
he figures and describes came from. He describes the flowers as 
rosy, ‘“‘ Begonia roseo flore folio orbicularia”’ ; in the plants raised 
from the seed collected by Mr. Nash some individuals bear white 
flowers, while others have flowers distinctly pinkish tinged. In 
the “Catalogus Plantarum Americanarum,” published by Plu- 
mier in 1703, and which Plumier cites in the later work, this 
plant is listed as having come from one of the American islands, 
and as many of Plumier’s species were obtained from Hayti, it 
would seem that it is very probable that Lamarck was wrong in 
assigning the species to South America 
ant is also recorded in the Appendix to Tournefort’s 
“Tnstitutiones Rei Herbariae, pp. 660,” 17c0, but with no indi- 
cation of its origin. 
N. L. Britton, 
Director-in-Chigf. 
PALAEOBOTANICAL NOTES. 
1. It has become necessary to rearrange and relable a large 
part of the carboniferous fossil plants, formerly regarded as ferns, 
in order to include them in the newly established group of the 
Cycadofilicales or Cycad-Ferns, in accordance with recent dis- 
coveries of inflorescence and fruit, which prove them to be higher 
in the scale of life than was previously thought to be the case. 
These discoveries have been largely due to the researches of 
D. H. Scott in England and David White in this country, result- 
ing in taking the genera Neuropteris, Alethopteris, Adiantites, 
Odontopteris and, in part, Sphexopterts out of the ferns and placing 
them in the new group. These genera, although founded upon 
specimens which had all the external characters of fern fronds, 
had long been looked upon with suspicion for the reason that 
they had never been found with any of the characteristic fruit 
dots or sori, although these were known to occur in abundance 
on the fronds of other fossil genera, such as Pecopteris. 
