SOLANUM TORREYI. 
TORREY’'S SOLANUM. 
NATURAL ORDER, SOLANACE-E. 
SOLANUM TorREYI, Gray.—Cinereous with a somewhat close furfuraceous pubescence composed 
of about equally nine to twelve-rayed hairs: prickles small and subuiate, scanty along the 
stem and midribs, or sometimes nearly wanting: leaves ovate with truncate or slightly 
cordate base, sinuately five to seven-lobed (four to six inches long); the lobes entire or 
undulate, obtuse, unarmed: cymes at first terminal, loose, bifid or trifid; lobes of the 
calyx (often six) short ovate with a long abrupt acumination. Corolla an inch anda 
half in diameter; its lobes broadly ovate: berry globose, an inch in diameter, yellow 
when mature. (Dr. Asa Gray in Synoptical Flora of North America.) 
HIS beautiful species of Solanum has a very brief botan- 
“yi ical history. It appears to have been met with es 
Tindheimer in Texas in 1843, “around Houston, the Brazos, etc.” 
and is noted in an account of his collections by Engelmann and 
Gray in 1845. It was then not well understood, and referred 
doubtfully to an old Linnzean species, a native of the West Indies, 
named Solanum mammosum, and some comparison made be- 
tween it and the Solanum Caroliniense, the well-known “ Horse- 
Nettle,” so troublesome to cultivators in many parts of the Union. 
that one described as S. 
platyphyllum by Dr. Torrey is to be regarded as this species; the 
S. platvphylum described by Humboldt, Bonpland and Kunth 
from South America being something else. Torrey’s name 
d 
Dr. Gray also notes in the “Synopsis” t 
being therefore appropriated by another, according to botanical 
rules the plant has to be renamed, and thus we find it now, as 
given by Dr. Gray, S. Zorreyz. This is all that we find noted 
of it in botanical works. Its geographical history is as brief. 
Dr. Gray says it grows on “ Prairies, etc—in Kansas and Texas.” 
It is not however in the catalogue of Kansas plants recently issued 
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