Manchester Memoirs, Vol. li. (1907), No. 11. 5 



and this is confirmed by my gathering the same species 

 on the other side of the estuary of the Ribble, from 1881 

 onwards, my earliest herbarium example bearing that 

 date. The species is North American, and it is recorded 

 as having occurred in Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia, 

 but the exact localities are not known. Lamarck's 

 original specimens in the museum at Paris, upon which 

 Seringe founded the species in the " Prodromus," bear the 

 date 1789. In my former paper, this plant was referred 

 to as CE. biennis, Linn., in the broad sense in which that 

 species is accepted ; many systematists include under it 

 various species and subspecies, such as cruciata, Nutt. ; 

 gauroides, Hornem. ; grandiflora, Soland. ; saaveolens, 

 Desf. ; and others. Lancashire botanists have been 

 accepting it as a large-flowered garden form of biennis ; 

 but it is not the same plant as that which I collected for 

 biennis in Jersey and other parts of England ; nor does it 

 agree with Crosby specimens in my herbarium ; while the 

 American biennis of the neighbourhood of New York 

 does not coincide with the biennis of the western hemis- 

 phere. The Crosby Oenothera has been established there, 

 and on other parts of the Lancashire coast, for a hundred 

 years. Two years ago, Dr. W. O. Focke, of Bremen, was 

 inquiring about an Oenothera which was spreading on the 

 sandy shores of west Germany (see Journal of Botany, 

 1905, p. 32;, and thinking that the St. Anne's plant 

 might be the same, I forwarded examples to that botanist 

 of the root-leaves of the Crosby plant, and complete 

 examples of the St Anne's plant, pointing out their 

 differences. Dr. Focke identified the St. Anne's plant as 

 CE. Lamarkiana, Ser. in DC. — the species which Dr. Hugo 

 de Vries has made so celebrated by his observations on 

 its mutability, in his "Die Mutationstheorie," (Leipzig, 

 1901 and 1902) and his " Species and Varieties ; their 



