OBBTAIW GBKTIANACBAB. 93 



were taught to call Gentiana quinqueflora. I had not seen itj 

 except in the herbaria, for several decades of years ; and my 

 first glance at the plant awakened something like a regret for 

 having, not many weeks before, been betrayed by false descrip- 

 tions of it in the books, into placing it as a congeneric with 

 those Amarella species of the farther West, the memory of 

 wliose floral characteristics was and is still vivid. 



Those western plants, genuine Amarella species, have a 

 corolla-limb that is rotate when expanded, or nearly rotate, so 

 that the corolla is salverf orm, or nearly that, and, at all events, 

 the limb expands. The same is said to be true of the G. quin- 

 queflora, but it is not so. Its corolla is not even truly funnel- 

 form, for its limb is never expanded at all, in the proper use of 

 that term. The whole corolla is tightly closed during almost 

 the whole period of its existence; and the only writer who de- 

 scribes it as if he had seen it with the eye of a botanist, calls it 

 clavate. That is much nearer the truth than any one else has 

 come ; a not indistinct angularity of both tube and closed limb 

 being the only obstacle to its being-described as clavate. 



At the time when these plants are at their best, showing their 

 corollas at full development and at the height of their inten- 

 sity of purple coloring, — the time when you would take them 

 for the making of the most perfect herbarium specimens — they 

 are not in flower, but long past that period, the corollas already 

 being filled with full grown capsules. At actual flowering the 

 corollas are much smaller, the tips of their segments are sepa- 

 rated just far enough to let air and small insects pass within ; 

 they do not spread even so far as to become erect ; and then, im- 

 mediately after fertilization of the ovary, the corolla closes, never 

 again to open, but, immediately proceeds to increase to about 

 twice the size it had at actual an thesis. 



These things are said confidently and for a certainty, only of 

 the western plant, at page 53 preceding denominated Amarella 

 occidentalis ; but they probably hold good, in at least some gene- 

 ral way, for the other members of what, if I mistake not, is both 

 a good genus, and one embracing several species. 



