The areas of relationship between Laphamia and Perityle (Compositae) have been poorly understood, and the genera are, in many respects, so distressingly similar that species have been described and tentatively placed in one or the other genus. And generic lines have been drawn and redrawn by more than one worker throughout the taxonomic history of the plants. Based on traditional methods of comparative morphology, supplemented by evidences from cytology, and in certain instances artificial hybridization, this treatment recognizes twently-one species and five subspecies of Laphamia . It recognizes Perityle as a taxonomic aggregate of some twenty-five ill-defined taxa.
