50 tEAFLBTS. 



tmens, namely, from the shores of the Mississippi at "Winona, 

 Minnesota, I hare the aquatic state in flower, communicated by 

 Professor Holzinger of the State Normal School at that place, 

 who collected it in 1897. The leaves, evidently floating, at 

 least the lowest, are not quite as large as in my specimens, but 

 are as perfectly glabrous, only the margins being either merely 

 scabrous-serrulate, or with the hair-points developed into what 

 approaches the spinulose-serrulate. The spikes are linear and 

 about 2 inches long, of a rich rose red; the bracts uncommonly 

 long-pointed, cuspidately however rather than acuminately, the 

 very apex being blunt. The peduncles are slender, and very 

 delicately glandular-hirtellous. The specimens give no hint of 

 any close affinity for that other long-spiked aquatic of north- 

 ern Iowa, P. plantaginea. 



The Neckerian Cactaceous Oenera. 



In this exclusively American family of plants at least five oJ 

 the genera now everywhere recognized as such are pre-Linnsean 

 Melocactus, Cereus, Opuniia, Phyllanthus, and Peireskia had all 

 been published anteriorly to the year 1753, in which year Lin- 

 naeus reduces them all to one genus, assigning it a new name. 

 Cactus. Moreover, among the twenty-two so-called species enu- 

 merated in the Species Plantarum of that date are the types oi 

 four other genera now everywhere accepted as such, namely, 

 Mamillaria, Pilocereus, Nopalia and Phyllocacius. 



Thus the types of nine distinct genera, as men now perceive, 

 were embraced within the Cactus of Linnseus. 



There were two botanists of the time who entered each hii 

 own protest against this jumbling together of incongruities 

 Adanson and Miller. The former of these did not so greatlj 

 improve the situation, distributing as he did all the Linnaear 

 species between the two pre-Linnsean genera, Opuntia and Cer- 

 eus ; though on an excellent type which Linnaeus had ignored 

 he proposed a new genus Hariota, the equivalent, I think, of th( 

 more recent Rhipsalis. It is also to be noted that he rejected at 

 being the mere synonym that it truly is, the Linnaean Cactus. 



