LOBELIA FEAYANA. 
DR. FEAY’S LOBELIA. 
NATURAL ORDER, LOBELIACE. 
Logpetia FEAYANA, Gray.—Slender, a span high, diffusely branched from the base, glabrous 
throughout: leaves small (a quarter to half an inch long), repand-detinculate, roundish 
or obovate, or the small uppermost spatulate or lanceolate and sessile; raceme loosely four 
to ten flowered ; pedicels as long as the flower, twice or thrice the length of the subulate 
bract: calyx tube and capsule broadly obconical; the latter two-thirds inferior, its free 
apex about the length of its subulate calyx lobes; these only half the length of the tube of 
the bright blue corolla: anthers glabrous (except the bearded tips of the shorter ones) : 
seeds oblong, with a rough cellular coat. (Gray's Synoptical Flora of North America.) 
MWAIHEN the lover of flowers who is. not a botanist in the 
strict sense of the term, hears a botanical name men- 
Goned for the first time, he is very likely to ask what is its Eng- 
lish or common one? It is not that botanical names are really 
more difficult to remember than others, but that a sound is not 
easily retained while unfamiliar. When once a botanical name 
enters into common language, no one ever thinks of it as diffh- 
cult; Thus in the present case there is, strictly speaking, no 
English name, but the botanical name Loédelra has become so 
familiar to all, that it has been received into every-day language, 
and no one now thinks it a name hard to remember. The little 
dwarf Lobelia of our gardens—the Lodela erinus from the Cape 
of Good Hope—has made the genus well known to most of us. 
The name itself is rather an old one, having been established by 
Plumier, who, as Milne tells us, was “an ingenious Frenchman, 
noted for his discoveries among American plants.” These works 
on American plants were published in Paris, at various times 
between 1693 and 1713. Lobel, after whom he named the 
genus, flourished nearly a century before, and was an author of 
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