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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLV 



jeets which one undertakes to deal with; and it is for this reason that one 

 must not be astonished that the botanists have not yet discovered the 

 seeds of a number of plants, though they knew these plants long since. 

 One must be the less surprised about this since among these plants, 

 there are several which can not be cultivated, and with which one meets 

 accidentally only, and others which, because of their smallness, also bear 

 only exceedingly small seeds, which frequently escape even the most 

 observant. The observation of which we are about to speak is related 

 to these kinds of investigations. It is in fact a matter of two plants 

 which we deem to be of the same genus, but of different species, of 

 which during the four years which we have known them, which we have 

 studied them, it has been impossible for us to observe the seeds. These 

 plants showed themselves to us for the first time in our garden; I had 

 never seen them before, neither there nor in other places, and I do not 

 know that botanists have made mention of them. 



Yet they are sufficiently tall to be observed by those who apply them- 

 selves to a knowledge of the Simples, if they grew commonly in our 

 gardens, just as are a number of other common plants; these new plants 

 finally have reproduced themselves in our garden, from the time above 

 mentioned, without one having been able to find seed upon them. 



According to the smell of these plants and the structure of their 

 flowers, I am satisfied they belong to the genus of the Mercury of which 

 we here represent the flower (Fig. A, PL 1). To make known the 

 nature of these herbs, we will begin by describing the first species which 

 we observed in the month of July of the year 1715, and we shall name 



Jt The plant was five to six inches high, its stem was about two lines 

 in thickness, bare at the base, round, of a pale green color, smooth, 

 shiny and nearly transparent, provided with five branches, two of which, 

 parallel and placed towards the base of the stem, were longer than two 

 inches. The others were unequally shorter. The stem and the branches 

 were rather irregularly beset with leaves without petioles, some alone 

 and bare {les unes seules et nues), the others attached in bunches and 

 intermixed, accompanied at their point of origin by several flower buds, 

 which together, or leaving some spaces between them, surround, 1 the 

 stem and the branches of this plant. The longest h-av.-s .■ndmir m a 



middle, some were wider at their base; some others were dissected 

 towards the point in two very narrow strips of different lengths, and 

 all of them were of a green-brown color, smooth, shiny and slightly 

 indented along their length. These leaves pointed in this or that direc- 

 tion without order, some with the tip turned upward, the others down- 

 ward, and others bent in sickle-like form. The smallest were placed 

 horizontally. All were rather stiff, notwithstanding their delicate tex- 

 ture, and they appeared more or less like the principal veins of leaves 



