60 LEAFLETS. 



lobed almost to the middle, the lobes broadly ovate, obtuse 

 but cuspidate-mucronate; some laterals like the terminals in 

 form but smaller, others ovate, obtuse, entire or else with one 

 small lateral lobe or tooth : panicle of staminate plant nearly 

 naked, rather contracted : flowers (only the staminate plant 

 known) white, with round-ovate obtuse sepals and many long 

 stamens ; filaments pronouncedly clavellate but only above 

 the middle, below that quite capillary and contorted ; anthers 

 short-oblong, abruptly very acute. 



Swamps of the Blue Ridge Mountains, northern Georgia, 

 10 July, 1900, Albert Ruth. Very marked species ; as to 

 foliage most of the leaflets closely imitating those of Hepatica. 



Certain American Roses. 



In the course of two thousand years' history of the genus 

 Rosa perhaps no more remarkable taxonomic discovery was 

 ever made than that which fell to the lot of Dr. C. C. Parry 

 and his party in 1882, when, botanizing along the seaboard 

 of the Mexican Territory of I,ower California, they came upon 

 that unknown shrub which Dr. Engelmann soon after pub- 

 lished as Rosa minutifolia. 



In general appearance that shrub is far removed from all 

 other roses that were then known, insomuch that I much 

 doubt whether such experienced botanists as those discoverers 

 were would have seen in it a member of the genus Rosa at all, 

 if the bushes had been devoid of all traces of buds, flowers or 

 fruits ; for it is only by its answering, as to flowers and fruits, 

 to the artificial phytographic technicalities which are allowed 

 to be definitive, that Rosa minutifolia is admitted to that 

 genus. 



During some fifteen years this Lower Californian curiosity 

 remained practically a monotypic subgenus. Then in 1897, 

 not much less than a thousand miles inland from the Mexican 



