A NEW SPECIES OF ERYTHRONIUM. 
BY PROFESSOR ASA GRAY. 
ORDINARILY it is hardly worth while to make a separate article 
for a single new species of plant, even when discovered in a dis- 
trict in which a new flowering plant is unexpected. But the spe- 
cies of Erythronium are so few, and the present one is so peculiar, 
and its habitat so closely bordering the region included in my 
Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States, that I need 
not apologize for bringing it at once to notice. 
The specimens before me, accompanied by a colored drawing, 
are just received from Miss S. P. Darlington (a daughter of the 
late Dr. Darlington, long the Nestor of American botanists and 
one of the best of men), and were collected at Faribault, Minne- 
sota, by Mrs. Mary B. Hedges, the teacher of Botany in St. 
Mary’s Hall, a school of which Miss Darlington is Principal. 
The flower is much smaller than that of any other known spe- 
cies, being barely half an inch long; and its color, a bright pink 
or rose, like that of the European Æ. Dens-Canis, reflects the 
meaning of the generic name (viz. red), which is lost to us in our 
two familiar Adder-tongues, one with yellow, the other with white, 
blossoms. The most singular peculiarity of the new species is 
found in the way in which the bulb propagates. In E. Dens-Canis 
new bulbs are produced directly from the side of the old one, on 
which they are sessile, so that the plant as it multiplies forms 
close clumps. In our E. Americanum long and slender offshoots, 
or subterranean runners, proceed from the base of the parent bulb 
and develop the new bulb at their distant apex. Our Western 
albidum does not differ in this respect. In the new species an off- 
shoot springs from the ascending slender stem, or subterranean 
sheathed portion of the scape (which is commonly five or six inches 
long), remote from the parent bulb, usually about mid-way be- 
are not free. Invariability and necessity are inseparably united. Opposed to worlds, 
crystals, and all inanimate matter, which is neither free nor variable, there appears 4 
h and variable. Itis, then, perfectly logés to presuppose 
in e last a principle peculiar to them and sui generis, the animistic principle, and 
it is is entirely ilke ogical to deny it 
PTEN MY T A to Darwinism and hath dAnetrines. illus- 
, ’ 
MUS Sec LOW 5y 
trating Faa J ti i ll ý mutually p t h other. 
(298) 
