24 Rhodora [ FEBRUARY 
SOME PLANTS ABOUT WILLIAMSTOWN. 
JosePH R. CHURCHILL. 
Ir is less than one hundred and fifty miles by rail from Boston, on 
the coast, to Williamstown, in the extreme northwest corner of the 
little State of Massachusetts; yet in this short distance, so much tem- 
pered is the harshness of our east wind, so elevated and diversified 
becomes the country as one goes west, with perhaps other differences 
of soil and climate, that a considerable change in the flora of the two 
places is soon discovered. Indeed, a botanist may well be surprised 
at the number of plants in the woods and meadows of the Hoosac 
Mountains which are rarely or never found near Boston. In the course 
of two short visits at Williamstown, in early June and in August, 1898, 
I collected many such plants, including some which I believe are also 
new or rare in Massachusetts, and some little account of these may be 
worth putting on record. 
Centaurea facea, L., is mentioned as a rare plant in Gray's Manual 
and in the Illustrated Flora of Britton and Brown, and in neither is 
it credited to Massachusetts. A single large patch grew by the side of 
the Pownal road near the Sand Springs, where I obtained fine speci- 
mens in August. With its long fimbriate sterile ray flowers and large 
heads, it is a more conspicuous and attractive plant than C. nigra, 
which is common about Boston and elsewhere; and I found that the 
patch was as much admired and “collected” by the ladies and chil- 
dren in the neighborhood for merely ornamental purposes as by myself 
for the equally ornamental and more lasting uses of the herbarium. 
It is curious to find that, according to Anne Pratt's Flowering Plants 
of Great Britain, C. /acea is of very rare occurrence in England, 
and it is not mentioned in Hooker's Student's Flora of the British 
Islands. 
Along the lower bare steep slopes of Northwest Hill, near the 
Hoosac River, I found Calamintha Acinos, Clairv. growing abun- 
dantly. There is no mention of this species in the Synoptical Flora or 
in Grays Manual In the Illustrated Flora, III, 109, as Cino- 
podium Acinos (L.) Kuntze, it is said to be found “in waste places in 
New York and New Jersey," and there are specimens in the Gray 
Herbarium from Ithaca, N. Y., and from Toronto, Canada. The plant 
in the field has much the appearance of Pennyroyal, but it is a strag- 
