PSBDEKA. 219 



the strongly cordate base, not cucuUate, the broad lobes meeting 

 or nearly meeting, but plane, not involute, the whole margin 

 remotely and lightly crenate : peduncles unusually stout and 

 fleshy, their bractlets supramedial, alternate: sepals much 

 elongated, lance-linear, lightly serrulate : corolla deep-blue, its 

 width f inch or more, and greater than its length, the odd petal 

 being much shorter than the others, all obtuse. Summer state 

 of plant not enlarged, its apetalous flowers few, short-peduncled, 

 their capsules not seen; the one latest petaliferous on each plant 

 producing a small capsule with few seeds. 



This handsome violet of open grassy places about springs 

 and along streamlets flowing from springs, was first brought to 

 my notice about five years since, the specimens having been 

 brought in quantity from a locality at the sources of Eock 

 Creek, just outside the District of Columbia, in Maryland. I 

 then saw that it was new, but declined at that time to give any 

 account of it. This season I have chanced to come upon exten- 

 sive masses of it, growing amid grasses, sedges and some hydro- 

 philous moss, on a tributary of Eock Creek within the District, 

 and having studied it in situ to my satisfaction, have decided to 

 give it a name and diagnosis. It was in perfect petaliferous 

 flower 7 May, 1906. 



Parthenocissus a Synonymn. 



Among the numerous medley genera of Linnaeus not many 

 are more impossible than his Iledera, composed as it is of 

 two species, one the Old World ivy, the other an American 

 grape. Tournefort more than a half-century earlier had deter- 

 mined Gormit's five-leaved ivy to be a grape and not an ivy, and 

 had named it Vitis quinquefolia , and this Tournefortian dis- 

 posal of the species met with almost universal approval for 

 nearly a century, notwithstanding Linnaeus' retrograde proposi- 

 tion; for after 1753 Adanson, Moench, Gaertner and others 

 retained the Virginia Creeper in Vitis, while only Crantz and 

 Miller stood by Linnaeus in calling it a Hedera. 



Necker, in 1790, appears to have been the first to indicate this 

 shrub as the type of a proper genus. 



