86 



somewhat compressed laterally. In all eastern specimens with 

 small flowers in our herbaria, except one from Wisconsin, the 

 lip seems to be like those from the Rocky Mountain region. 

 The first plate I turned to of C. parvifloram was that in Curtis's 

 Botanical Magazine, 23 : pi. gn. This has the narrow high lip 

 characteristic of the plant that I have held as C. parviflorum and 

 which was published under that name in Britton's Manual. 

 Turning to the Kew Index, I find that this plate is referred by 

 Mr. Jackson to C. pubcsccns. It is evidently the same as C. 

 pubescens of Sweet's English Flower Garden, mentioned above, 

 but surely not the same as that of Willdenow's Hortus Berolin- 

 ensis, which must be regarded as authentic. The same plant 

 is also figured in Redoute's Les Liliacees, I : pi. 20. 1802, under 

 the name of C. flavescens. 



So far my interpretations seemed to have been correct, but 

 now comes the trouble. I turned to the original publication of 

 C. parviflorum Salisb. in the Transactions of the Linnean Society, 

 I : J J. Salisbury has there a figure of the flower with a very 

 broad and low lip, closely resembling Willdenow's figure of C. 

 pubescens. C. parviflorum is compared with C. Calceolus of Eu- 

 rope and described and figured as having much smaller flowers 

 than that species. It may be remarked that C. Calceolus 

 scarcely has as large flowers as our C. pubcsccns and conse- 

 quently the true C. parviflorum should not have larger flowers 

 than C. passcriuum of the far north and much smaller flowers 

 than either of the two yellow lady's-slippers known by me. 



The result of my investigations are in short as follows : 



1. That C. hirsutum Mill. (C. pubcsccns Willd.) has been 

 rightly understood by Dr. Britton and me, and wrongly so by 

 the English botanists and by Gray. 



2. That either do we have three species of yellow lady's- 

 slippers, one large and one small-flowered, both with vertically 

 flattened lip, and a third medium-sized one with laterally flattened 

 lip ; or else was C. parviflorum Salisb. a small-flowered form of 

 C. hirsutum. 



3. In either case, the one with laterally flattened lip is neither 

 C. pubescens nor C. parviflorum. 



