34 Rhodora [February 



of very similar habit trailed in graceful prostrate sprays over the 

 shifting sands. These were two Junipers; /. communis, var. Cana- 

 densis, and/. Sabina va.r. procumbens, and the Crowberry (Empetrum). 

 With them in the dry sand were Hudsonia tomen/osa ; Rosa lucida, 

 var. ; Vaccinium Vitis-Idaea ; Arctostaphylos, and Smilacina stellata, 

 — names, many of them, more suggestive of the mountains than of 

 the seashore. 



Senecio sylvaticus was common, especially along the shores. Its 

 handsome relative, the Tansy Ragwort, or " Stinking Willie " as it is 

 called in Scotland (Senecio Jacobaca, L.), is now vigorously asserting 

 itself here and traveling rapidly and extensively southward through 

 the Maritime Provinces. Yet in the Synoptical Flora, in 1884, it is 

 dismissed in a single line, as " with some other species, occasionally 

 occurring as ballast waifs." I had seen and collected the bright 

 golden Mowers about the railroad stations as I came through New 

 Brunswick, but I learned later that, like many a fine looking fellow, 

 his reputation is very bad. The charges against the plant as stated 

 by Mr. Lawrence W. Watson, a botanist of Charlottetown, in an article 

 contributed by him to a local publication, and entitled " Wolves in 

 Sheep's Clothing," are briefly that, as a pernicious and aggressive 

 weed, it is an enemy to the farmer ; second, that it is largely 

 responsible for asthma and hay fever; and finally that it was the 

 cause of a fatal epidemic which recently prevailed extensively among 

 the cattle of Pictou County, Nova Scotia. With reference to the 

 last charge there was, I think, an official investigation, but the evidence 

 of guilt was not clear. So I was pleased, considering its good looks 

 and our short acquaintance, to discredit these reports, and aquit it 

 of all but the ordinary vices of a vagrant weed. 



Two other introduced plants quite new to me, both also with weedy 

 tendencies, were frequent about Tracadie. One, Mentha rubra, 

 Hudson, is very similar to our only native Mint, M. Canadensis, L. ; 

 but the flowers are larger and reddish-pink, and there are other dis- 

 tinctions in the character of the pubescence and the leaves. The 

 plant is handsome and readily distinguished in the field. The other 

 plant, Gnaphaliuin sylvaticum, one of the Everlastings, grew about the 

 edges of cultivated fields and roadsides. This weed seems not only 

 to thrive under cultivation, but to improve, in appearance at least, 

 under the severe and often destructive processes of the botanist. Like 

 all the Kverlastings, it adapts itself readily to pressing, drying, poison- 



