166 Rhodora [SEPTEMBER 
ored illustration of the plant was presented;! and under the name 
Symphoricarpos racemosus the shrub soon became common in cultiva- 
tion, and no one seems to have noticed that it was unlike the Cana- 
dian type preserved in the Michaux herbarium. 
Robbins's Symphoricarpos racemosus, var. pauciflorus, as originally 
published in the fifth edition of Gray’s Manual, in 1867, was 
distinguished by having reduced inflorescences and it came from 
“Rocky woods of L. Superior, Dr. Robbins, and northwestward. 
Alleghanies of Pennsylvania, /. R. Lowrie, Mr. Bocking" No men- 
tion, however, was made of the remarkable whitening of the under 
leaf-surfaces which is conspicuous in all Robbins’s Lake Superior 
material and that from “northwestward” (ż. e., Lake Winnipeg Val- 
ley, Bourgeau). The leaves of the Pennsylvania material, from Blair 
and Huntington Counties, originally associated with the Lake Supe- 
rior plant, are merely pale green but not white beneath and are like 
those of the pubescent-leaved plant of western New England and 
Quebec which is now identified with the Michaux type of S. racemosus. 
The attempt to separate as a variety or a species the plants with 
reduced inflorescences is apparently artificial. At Bic, where the 
pubescent-leaved plant which has generally passed in the East as 
Symphoricarpos racemosus, var. pauciflorus (but which is really the true 
S. racemosus) abounds, shrubs on the same slope have the flowers 
solitary or in twos, or often several in an interrupted raceme. Again, 
the glabrous-leaved plant which has erroneously passed as true S. 
racemosus may often quite lack the elongate terminal raceme which 
is supposed to characterize it. Without characters other than those 
found in the presence or absence of pubescence on the leaves, the 
three plants occurring in eastern America are best treated as varieties 
of a broadly distributed species. 
SYMPHORICARPOS RACEMOSUS, Michx.  Shrub o.2 to r m. high: 
leaves from elliptic-oblong to orbicular, pilose beneath.— Fl. Bor.-Am. 
i. 107 (1803). Var. pauciflorus, Robbins in Gray, Man. ed. 5, 203 
(1867), as to Pennsylvania plant; and most authors of New England, 
New York, and Pennsylvania. .S. pauciflorus, Britton, Mem. Torr. 
Cl. v. 3o5 (1894), in part.— Rupert Land to Alaska, south to Berk- 
shire County, Massachusetts, Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Penn- 
sylvania, Michigan, Montana, Idaho, and California.— Much of the 
! Sims, Bot. Mag. xlviii. t. 2211 ( 1821). 
