1907] Fernald,— Soil Preferences of Alpine Plants 151 
Maine and New Hampshire are, like Empetrum nigrum and Rubus 
"Chamaemorus, the common plants of Labrador and other subarctic 
and arctic regions of America. Another large group of isolated 
species is well represented by Dryas Drummondit, one of the com- 
monest and most showy plants of the ledgy shores and gravelly 
beaches of the Gaspé Peninsula and of Anticosti Island. This 
beautiful shrub, so common in Gaspé and Anticosti, is quite unknown 
elsewhere east of the Rocky Mts. There, however, it is found 
throughout the System from northwestern Montana northward, along 
alpine rivers to the shores of the Arctic Sea.' 
When, on the other hand, we examine the detailed distribution of 
the plants which characterize the low altitudes, or at least the every- 
day inhabited portions of New England and eastern Canada, a very 
different situation is found. ‘The most familiar plants of these regions, 
instead of occurring only at few and remote highly specialized stations, 
are of general or continuous distribution over broad and easily defined 
areas. Thus, to cite a few. typical illustrations, Clematis virginiana 
occurs along streams from the Baie des Chaleurs to Georgia, and west 
to Lake Winnipeg and the Mississippi valley. Anemonella thalictroides 
is common in dry woods from southern New Hampshire westward to 
southern Ontario and Minnesota, south to Maryland, and in the 
upland country to western Florida. Viola conspersa? occurs very 
generally in alluvial woods and thickets or in wild meadows from 
southern Gaspé and eastern New Brunswick west to the Great Lake 
region, south to Maryland, West Virginia and southern Indiana, and 
locally along the mountains southward. Ilex monticola grows in rich 
woods of the Alleghanies from northern Alabama northward across 
Pennsylvania, and locally to the Taconic Mountains of southwestern 
Massachusetts and the hill-country of western New York. Aster 
subulatus in its general distribution follows the coastal marshes from 
New Hampshire to Florida. These five species of Clematis, Anemon- 
ella, Viola, Ilex, and Aster, illustrate very fairly the general and con- 
tinuous distribution of a large proportion of our plants of the north- 
temperate regions. 
The isolation above indicated of the alpine and subalpine plants in 
New England, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec (as well as 
on the Adirondack Mts. and in other cold areas of New York, on the 
1 See Macoun, Cat. Can. Pl. i. 132 (1883). 
? Viola conspersa Reichenb. (V. canina L., var. Muhlenbergii Trautv.). 
