160 (ENOTHERA MISSOURIENSIS. —LARGE-FRUITED PRIMROSE. 
and showed that Sims’ plant was really the same as his, and in- 
sisted on his name, chiefly because “the specific name is inappli- 
cable, as it never was found anywhere else but near St. Louis, 
where Mr. Nuttall gathered ripe fruit of it, specimens of which I 
have seen.” Mr. Nuttall follows, in 1818, with his “Genera of 
North American Plants,” and sets aside both their names, and 
describes it as @©. a/ata, for no other reason apparently than that 
it “more appropriately” represented the large-winged fruit (Fig. 
3). Modern botanists, however, look on a name with no mean- 
ing as quite as good as the “most appropriate,’ and adhere 
strictly to the law of priority of description, and this gives the 
name of Sims’ @inothera Missouriensis as the correct one. 
Mr. Nuttall tells us that it was first discovered by Mr. Brad- 
bury, thirty miles from St. Louis “on the Merrimac,” meaning of 
course the Missouri; but since then it has been found widely 
extended throughout the Southwest. It was even collected, in 
1862, by Hall and Harbor in the Rocky Mountains, but is prob- 
ably rare so far north, as it seems not to have been collected by 
subsequent botanists. 
The botanical name @:xo/hera is a very ancient one. Lin- 
neus believed it to be the “podded Lysimachia” of Theo- 
phrastus, a very ancient Greek writer. Of modern botanists, 
Sir William J. Hooker says it is from “ozzos, wine, and ¢éhera, 
searching or catching, from the root having caught the perfume 
of wine;” but our American text-books tell us it is not that the 
root catches the perfume of wine, but that those who ate the root 
caught a greater taste for wine. The moderns, however, catch 
the taste for wine so easily that no herb is necessary to aid them; 
and, at any rate, whatever may have been the plant or the mean- 
ing intended by the ancients, we may remember that it could not 
have been one of our Evening Primroses, no matter how near 
the relationship may be guessed to be, as the genus Cxothera 
is wholly American, and, of course, was entirely unknown to the 
Greeks and Romans. 
EXPLANATIONS OF THE PLATE.—1. One of several branches forming a plant. 2. An unopened 
flower. 3. A seed-vessei nearly mature, 
