110 Rhodora [JUNE 
freely branching, densely tufted stems which (in the dried plants) are 
1.5-3 mm. in diameter and rising only 0.5-2 dm. above the sand. Its 
leaves are somewhat fleshy, ovate to elliptic, 0.5-2 em. long; its 
flowers, to quote the description of Bentham and Hooker, are “‘few, 
on short pedicels, in small, leafy, terminal eymes, usually more or less 
unisexual" 1; its globose thick-walled capsules, ‘‘about the size of a 
small pea," ? are by measurement 6-8 mm. in diameter, containing 
few rather lustrous large dark brown seeds. ‘This small plant with 
definite short cymes occurs in America, so far as known to the writer, 
only upon the coast of Labrador and in arctic Alaska. 
On the shores of Behring Sea and the North Pacific from the 
Aleutian Islands south to Japan occurs an extremely large plant, 
coarser in all its parts than the true Arenaria peploides, but with well 
developed cymes as in the typical form. This large North Pacific 
plant seems to be, however, not a mere luxuriant development of 4. 
peploides, but a well defined variety, for the walls of its capsules are 
comparatively thin and so translucent (in the dried specimens) as to 
show clearly the forms of the very lustrous light reddish-brown seeds. 
This large variety was also collected by the late Rev. A. C. Waghorne 
on the west coast of Newfoundland; and, in view of the known affinity 
of the flora of western Newfoundland and Gaspé with that of the North 
Pacifie region, may be looked for elsewhere about the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence. 
The common plant from north of the Straits of Belle Isle, on the 
coast of Labrador, seems in every way identical with the Greenland 
Arenaria peploides, var. diffusa Hornem., which is depressed, with 
even more slender branches than in the European type, these often 
purple-tinged and very slightly if at all thickened; and which has only 
1-3 flowers in the upper axils instead of definite cymes. The var. 
diffusa of Greenland and Labrador in its matted habit and slender 
stems superficially resembles luxuriant plants of Stellaria humifusa 
rather than the coarse rigid plant with which we are familiar farther 
south on the Atlantic coast or a somewhat less extreme variation which 
occurs on the Pacific coast from the Aleutian Islands to Washington 
and Japan. 
This common plant of the Pacific coast from southern Alaska 
1B & H. Brit. Fl. ed, 7, 68 (1900). 
2 Syme, Engl. Bot. ii, 107 (1873). 
3 Hornem, Oec. Pl. ed. 3, 501 (1821). 
