148 Rhodora [July 



tion near Wilton and Carthage ; and it was noticed by the writer on 

 tablelands and slopes at 1500 to 3000 ft. on various minor mountains 

 of central and western Maine. In fact, from its general distribution 

 on the lower mountains of Maine the plant had come to be looked 

 upon by him as an ordinary form of Empetrum nigrum with redder 

 fruit than generally described. 



Recently, however, an examination has shown that this reddish 

 fruited Crowberry differs in another character from the black-fruited 

 Empetrum nigrum. In the common species of arctic and subarctic 

 Europe. Asia, and America the branchlets are glabrous or at most 

 minutely pulverulent-roughened. In the common form of central and 

 western Maine the branchlets are tomentose or even lanate and the 

 young leaves more or less covered with a loose web of hairs. 



A tendency to red fruit is not unknown in the ordinary northern 

 plant with glabrous twigs; and such a plant was described by Rafin- 

 esque as Empetrum purpureum} His species, however, described as 

 smooth, is apparently a form of E, nigrum and not the plant with 

 tomentose branchlets. This latter plant of central and western Maine 

 is represented in the Gray Herbarium by a single sheet from the Bay 

 of Islands, Newfoundland, an old sterile branch collected by Oakes 

 in the White Mts.. and a fruiting branch collected by William Boott 

 in Carter Notch, New Hampshire; and it has been collected by Dr. 

 G. G. Kennedy on the slopes of Mt. Washington. Besides these 

 specimens from Newfoundland and New Hampshire no other material 

 from North America, Europe, or Asia is found to match the pubescent 

 plant of interior Maine ; while the shrub of the Maine coast, of the 

 summits of Mts. Washington, Clay, Lafayette, and Mansfield, and of 

 Lake Superior, Labrador, and Arctic America agrees with the Euro- 

 pean E. nigrum in having glabrous or at most pulverulent branchlets. 



In the Gray Herbarium, however, there are two sheets from the 

 Andes of Chili which in habit, foliage and pubescence closely match 

 the common form from interior Maine. This Chiliaa plant was 

 described in De Candolle's Prodromus as Empetrum nigrum y andi- 

 nu»r and it was said to be glabrate, and to have red fruit ; but 

 Hooker * in discussing the genus had previously treated the Chilian 

 plant as identical with E. ru/>rum, Willd. 4 



1 New Flora, iii. 50 (1836). 

 3 DC. Prodr. xvi. pt. 1, 26 (1869). 

 1 Hook. Fl. Antarct. ii. 345 (1847). 

 A Willd. Spec. iv. pt. 2, 713 (1806). 



