316 
Mr. Brown’s Observations on the 
This, and not (as M. Richard has supposed) the nearly related 
species of North America, is what Linneus originally intended by 
his Bideiis nivea, as appears by the specimen in his Herbarium ; 
by his original reference to Vaillant’s “ Ceratocephalus foliis 
cordatis s. triangularibus flore albo*/’ described from a speci¬ 
men in Surian’s Herbarium ; and by his afterwards adding as va¬ 
rieties of his species the two plants from Carolina figured in 
Hortus Elthamensis. 
Calea aspera is abundantly distinct from Bidens , and has very 
little affinity with any of the original species of Calea , and least 
of all with C. jamaicensis, from which the character was taken. 
Since its appearance in Willdenow’s work, however, it has been 
continued in this genus, in most of the recent catalogues of Gar¬ 
dens, as those of Desfontaines, Decandolle, and the second edi¬ 
tion of Mr. Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis; and Lamarck in his lllus- 
trationes Generum has copied Jacquin’s figure of it, apparently 
as the principal example of the genus Calea. 
It is certainly now too late to recur to the name of Amellus, un¬ 
der which Browne, as 1 have already attempted to prove, first pro¬ 
posed this plant as a distinct genus; Linneus having soon after 
given that generic name to two very different plants, to one of 
w hich it is still applied ; and the real plant of Browne having till 
now been mistaken, owing in part to his having entirely over¬ 
looked the pappus which is deciduous. 
Bidens nivea, however, as long ago as 1784 was described by 
Von Rohr, and published by him in 179 2 in the second volume of 
the Transactions of the Natural History Society of Copenhagen, 
as a distinct genus, under the name of Melanthera: and in 1803 by 
Richard, in Michaux’s Flora Boreali-Americana, where it is called 
M elan anther a, and where the two species included by Linneus 
* Act. Paris. 1720, p. 327. 
in 
