Frir?.ce Salm 



Marcfr 25, 1B53 



are tran*?f erred fron one arenus to arother. But where ?' If I cdmld 

 have guessed this event in the year 18^9 ( and through a half irtui- 

 4#on I put the ^ Aulacothelae at the very end) , and had I knowrr at 

 that time, as well as I do now,.the soft, almost snooth, and nostly 

 red herries of several Echirocacti (fron the subdi Vision h*mn ti and 

 the 4 Theloideae) , I would have tried to c&mbine all these speciesr in 

 my genus Malacoearpus« . The essential character of them H Bacca (excer- 

 ta) subloeris, , oblonga, suecosa, nolli s , . penicilli s quibusdan sangui- 

 nosis instrueta' 1 is entirely dominant for the above plants, as is t , 

 also, g-ernine exsero for the Man i Ilaria e, a"d the genus Echinoc actus 

 would be better character! zetf through the Baoca sei>alis a dnatis squa- 

 matta,. pulvillisque setigeris (aut acnleif eri s) i^strueta, Onlv, I 

 should have divided the Halacocarpi into 3 sections: - 1) Manmilaries- 

 f ornis ; 2) Setiger! -, and 3)' corvnades, and in this way, I believe, the 

 transition fron the Hanillariae to the Echinocacti would have best beerr 

 accomplished«. 



En. resume, now, , may Your Wellborn convince hinseif, that nothing 



could force you to abandon the positiorr, which I have sketched. - If >( 



on the one side, Nature formed certain group/s< f , which can not be sepa - 



rated f ,and on the other side, , the science, -Tin 1 rlt 1 ruij r n 1 i. to the bota— 



nists, that flowers and fruit S £ indicate oertairr characteristicsr to- 



initiate a genusi . ~ This must be mentioned always, , and I could not raen- 



tion a better exemple than that of Opuntia cylindracea» . Clearer thair 



here the external form can not give an. indicatiorr, and had somebody 



elevated this group into a genus t r would certainly have aeeepted this 



genus, and would have left it to time and more detailed examinatlorr,, 



to fill in the nissing; I had, however, in the genus Napalea separated 



plants quite similar to Qpuntia , becai3.se the flowers were differentt: „ 



and could not dare to separate the H. cylindracea, for which I did not 



know of the least dif ference in flowers to mentiorr.. Your discoverjr, con- 

 cerning the strueture of the seed, had not yet been raade; this is not 



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Missouri 

 Botanical 

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