No. 577] 



NOTES AND LITERATURE 



In the discussion which must develop from the conclusions of 

 De Vries he has taken by far the more difficult position since he 

 attempts an identification of herbarium material with a type 

 very accurately known to us through widely cultivated living 

 forms. My argument is presented primarily against his identi- 

 fications. It is not in any degree necessary to my argument that 

 I should assign the sheets under consideration to definite species. 

 Whether this can be done for any of them time will tell and I 

 must repeat that as evidence the character of the pubescence 

 may prove of the greatest value. I am working on the hypothesis 

 that the specimens of Lamarck and that of Abbe Pourret are 

 forms of 0. grandiflora Solander. As for the specimen of Andre 

 Michaux, so many remarkable forms of CEnothera are coming 

 into the experimental garden from the southern and western 

 United States that I am quite unwilling to express at present 



De Vries has welcomed my suggestion that the source of the 

 cultures of Carter and Company may have been not Texas, as 

 they state, but England. This possibility seems to me to offer 

 an important line of investigation of early British records and 

 collections, but at present the suggestion appears to me nothing 

 more than a working hypothesis, although well worthy of atten- 

 tion. Texas and the West have some wonderful large-flowered 

 Oenotheras and Carter and Company may have obtained frcm 

 such sources a plant which later hybridizing with other forms 

 produced the Lamarckiana of our present cultures. That there 

 are American western species which will hybridize with Euro- 

 pean biennis and produce a synthetic Lamarckiana is I believe 

 established by my present studies with CEnothera franciscana 

 Bartlett. 



In recent papers I have reported that first generation hybrids 

 of 0. franciscana pollinated by the Dutch biennis have the 

 essential taxonomic characters of the small-flowered forms of 

 O. Lamarckiana. They differ from Lamarckiana in relatively 

 small plus or minus expressions of these characters. It was to be 

 expected that large F 2 generations would give a wide range of 

 variation or segregation of characters and that forms would 

 appear much closer to Lamarckiana than the parent F l plants. 

 This proved to be the case in F 2 cultures of last summer (1914) 

 totaling about 1.G00 plants. Among these I obtained a number 

 of individuals which were so close to the large-flowered Lamarck- 

 iana that flowering shoots could scarcely be distinguished as to 



