A Botanical Survey Of San Jacinto Mountain (1902) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Oxytheca emarginata Rail, sp. nov. Plate XIV. Slender annual, 2-6 in. high, more or less glandular-pubescent up to the involucres, the leaves and bracts sparsely strigose- pubescent, the whole herbage and especially the involucres early turning red: leaves clustered near base of stem, narrow, oblan- ceolate, ernargiuate, 4-8 lines long: bracts ternate, or the lower rarely 4 or 5 in a whorl, ovate, awned, united at base except on one side of the stem: peduncles 1-4 lines long; involucres obpyra- midal, 3 lines high, shallowly 5-lobed, each lobe with a narrow white membranous margin and tipped with an awn a line or less in length: flowers usually 4, on short pedicels, slightly exserted, externally pubescent on the lower half: segments 6, distinct to the base, oblanceolute, fimbriate above into slender divisions, If lines long: stamens 9: akene triangular, enclosed by the withering-persistent perianth. Collected on a gravelly ridge near Tahquitz Peak, San Jacinto Mts., California, at about 7200 ft. alt., July 2, 1901 (H. M. Hall, no. 2331.) The type is in the Herbarium of the University of California. The organ which immediately engages our attention on exam- ing this species is the conspicuous red involucre, which is formed by the coalescence of the five bracts into a concave disk, thus simulating the disk produced by the union of the bracts around the stem in 0. pvrfoliuta. That the disk in the proposed species does not correspond to that in 0. perfoliafa is made clear, however, when we consider that in the latter it encloses an inner involucre, which itself surrounds a number of flowers, while within the disk of 0. emarginata we find nothing but flowers, each borne on a short pedicel. Moreover, the disk of 0. perfoliata is made up of but 3 united bracts, as against 5 in 0...