THE PELTATE PEPEROMIAS OF NORTH AMERICA? 
WILLIAM TRELEASE 
(WITH PLATES I-IV) 
A herbaceous pepper from Santo Domingo, with large slightly 
peltate leaves, was called Piper maculosum by LINNAEUS in 1753, 
the year conventionally agreed upon as the starting point in 
phanerogamic nomenclature. This species was transferred to 
Peperomia by the elder HOOKER in 1825. When Ruiz and PAvon 
established the genus Peperomia in 1794, they included in it three 
Peruvian species with peltate leaves; one of these they named 
P. umbilicata and one P. variegata. In 1804 VAHL described, as 
Piper hernandifolium, a fifth species, from the West Indies, with 
such foliage. Dzierricn recognized this as a Peperomia in 1831. 
Another South American Peperomia was described in 1815 by 
HuMBoLptT, BonpLanpD, and KuntH, who also found in Mexico 
what they took for the Peperomia umbilicata-of Ruiz and Pavon. 
Following these determinations, most of the Mexican specimens 
with centrally peltate foliage have been called P. umbilicata; but 
Martens and Gateortti differentiated a close counterpart of 
P. umbilicata in 1843, as well as a diminutive species with barely 
peltate leaves. On the latter, before the Belgian botanists had 
secured printing of their account of GALEOTTI’s numerous dis- 
coveries in the Mexican flora, M1quEeL, who was engaged on a 
monographic study of the Piperaceae, based the name Ti/denia 
mexicana, and transferred it to Peperomia under the same specific 
name in 1843 in his classic monograph of the Piperaceae, where 
their other peltate species appears as P. monticola, and which also 
added the Brazilian peltate species P. arifolia now so much culti- 
vated in a silvery-striped variety. A Guatemalan species rather 
closely comparable in some respects with the original P. umbilicata 
was named P. claytonioides in 1847 by KuNTH, to whom are com- 
* Presented in abstract before the Systematic Section of the Botanical Society 
of America at Toronto, December 29, 1921. 
133] [Botanical Gazette, vol. 73. 
