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credited with six species. And in 1876 the generic name Gloio- 

 phloea had been proposed by J. Agardh for an Australian plant 

 that had been previously referred to Scinaia furcellata. It was 

 this group of seven supposed species, currently placed in two 

 genera, that Setchell undertook to set in order, and in this un- 

 dertaking he has evidently met with distinguished success. In 

 this assemblage, in the world as a whole, Setchell now finds 

 grounds for recognizing twenty species, distributed in three 

 genera — Scinaia with eleven species, Gloiophloea with seven, 

 and Pseudo scinaia, a new genus, with two species. In what, 

 until recently, had been passing as Scinaia furcellata on the 

 eastern and western coasts of North America, he now recognizes 

 eight species, of which he places five in Scinaia, two in Gloio- 

 phloea, and one in Pseudo scinaia. It should, perhaps, be re- 

 marked that the thallus in all the plants of the group is very 

 gelatinous and dried specimens do not revive satisfactorily on 

 being soaked out, even when swelling reagents are applied. To 

 this last fact and to the study of dried specimens alone are doubt- 

 less to be attributed some of the confusions that have obtained 

 in the past. 



Differences in the structure of the cystocarp, in the character 

 of the cortex, and in the external form of the thallus, are, in the 

 main, what the author of the paper has relied upon for diagnostic 

 peculiarities. Just how distinct all of the proposed genera and 

 species really are, of course remains for the future to determine, 

 but so far as the material now available is concerned, they do 

 not seem to intergrade, even though they are sometimes super- 

 ficially similar. The case of the Scinaia assemblage appears to 

 be much like that of many other tangles all along the line from 

 the algae and fungi to the seed-plants that have been unraveled 

 in the last few years — cases in which a supposed extremely 

 variable and widely distributed species has been found on critical 

 study to consist of two or more separable non-intergrading things, 

 sometimes with distinct and limited geographic ranges or some- 

 times with nearly identical overlapping or widely extended 

 ranges. When only two things have been confused it is usually 

 not very difficult to separate them, but when three or more re- 



