CENOTHERA MISSOURIENSIS. —LARGE-FRUITED PRIMROSE. 159 
of our earlier botanists, as it shows how the good poet has to 
observe as closely, perhaps, as the botanist. He says: 
* T love, at such an hour, to mark, 
Their beauty greet the light breeze chill, 
And shine ’mid shadows gathering dark, 
The garden’s glory still.” 
Pursh, when writing of an allied species, remarked that in the 
darkest night the flowers could always be plainly seen, but that 
they appeared white then instead of yellow, and he thought it 
might be owing to some phosphorescent property in the petals. 
Again, we may give an instance of the correspondence be- 
tween poetical observation and the observations of botanists, in 
a passage from Keats, another celebrated English poet: 
“A tuft of evening primroses, 
O’er which the wind may hover till it dozes; 
O’er which it well might take a pleasant sleep, 
But that it is ever startled by the leap 
Of buds into ripe flowers.” 
And this immediate starting of buds into ripe flowers has been 
noticed especially in our species, one observer having heard the 
opening of the blossoms, so suddenly do they expand. Pursh 
tells us that in his observations this opening generally occurred 
about five o’clock in the evening. 
In looking into its botanical history there seems to have been 
some ill feeling among the early botanists about the original 
naming of the plant, and the result is that different authors have 
different names for it. The first published description is by 
Sims, in the “ Botanical Magazine,” for 1814. A flower was sent 
to him from a plant growing in Mr. Nuttall’s garden near Liver- 
pool, by whom it was found in the neighborhood of the Missouri 
in North America, and on this he named it G:xothera Afissourt- 
ensis. Pursh about this time was in London preparing for his 
“Flora of North America,” and had permitted Sims to examine 
his manuscript, in which this species was described as Cenothera 
macrocarpa. Sims supposed his plant different from the one in 
Pursh’s herbarium. Pursh’s work appeared very soon afterwards 
