IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
llli 
It may be pointed out that the mutants o.f 0. Lamar ckiana all have 
certain features in common, which they also share with the parent form. 
These (See Gates 1909) include (1) the presence of the long type of 
hair on the stems and buds, arising from papillae which, on the stems', 
are red; (2) the quadrangular shape of the buds; (3) the large flowers 
with long style. It has sometimes been suggested that the phenomenon 
of mutation in 0. Lamar ckiana is a form of hybrid splitting, 0. La- 
marckiana itself being merely a synthesized hybrid. Supposing this 
were the case, 0. grandiflora and 0. hiennis are the only forms we 
know which could reasonably be assumed to have been its parents. It 
is true that 0. biennis possesses the first two of the characters mentioned 
above, in common with 0. Lamar ckiana and its mutants. But if 0. La^ 
marckiana had been synthesized in this’ manner, why should all the 
mutants fail entirely to show either the small flowers with short style, 
characteristic of 0. biennis, or any of the many peculiarities (elsewhere 
enumerated) of 0. grandiflora? All the evidence I can find, from ev- 
ery standpoint, is opposed to such a possible origin for the mutating 
0. Lamar ckiana. 
SUMMARY. 
To recapitulate briefly the history of the three species Oenothera Lam- 
ar ckiana Ser., 0. grandiflora Ait., and 0. biennis L., as far as it is now 
known, we may say that the form known to Bauhin in 1623 as Lysima- 
cliia lutea co^micidata {Onagra latifolia, Tournefort, 1700) was a large- 
flowered Oenothera, undoubtedly more like 0. Lamar ckiana than any 
other species, though differing in certain rosette characters from the 
0. Lamar ckiana of our present cultures. This is proved by an appendix 
in Bauhin ’s Pinax, and the original discovery of the record was from 
marginal notes copied into the book by Joannis Snippendale. 
The important fact is thus disclosed that a form closely resembling 
0. Lamarckiana was the first Oenothera introduced into Europe from 
Virginia about 1614, and therefore that it did not originate in cultiva- 
tion. While the Oenothera of this early record seems to have differed 
somewhat from our present 0. Lamarckiana, these differences are small 
compared with the important characters in which they agree, and make 
it necessary to include this plant in the 0. Lamarckiana series of forms. 
This description by Bauhin, of plants grown in 1619, is evidently the 
basis of Robert Morison’s description of the same plant in 1680. An in- 
dependent^ description in Parkinson’s Paradisus in 1629, refers to the 
same plant under the name Lysimachia Virginiana. Ray in 1686 in his 
Historia Plantarnm, repeats the Morison description with numerous 
