36 Rhodora [FEBRUARY 
such is the case, I doubt if they have made the fact generally known. 
These notes of their occurrence there may be regarded as helping to 
fill a gap in their recorded geographical distribution, rather than 
materially extending their range. 
PROVIDENCE, R. I. 
A SPURLESS HALENIA FROM MAINE. 
M. L. FERNALD. 
DuniNG the past two seasons, while collecting the spurred-gentian 
in various parts of Maine, my attention has often been attracted by a 
plant, which, in flower, seems more like a species of the true gentian, 
Gentiana. Though the plant is habitally identical with the common 
Halenia deflexa, and it occurs in similar or even the same situations, 
most of its corollas entirely lack the spurs, which, superficially, distin- 
guish the spurred-gentians from the true gentians. Since the plant 
was first noticed on the gravelly wooded banks of the Meduxnakeag 
River, in Houlton, it has been carefully watched at other stations ; and 
it has been noted that occasionally the first flowers produced by the 
plants bear the spurs so characteristic of /alenia deflexa, while the 
later flowers are quite spurless, so that the plant bears flowers seem- 
ingly typical of both the genera, Ha/enia and Gentiana. 
Early in this century a similar plant, collected in Newfoundland by 
Miss Brenton, was described by Grisebach as Halenia heterantha, 
with an excellent plate identical with the Maine specimens, in Hooker's 
Flora Boreali-Americana. Commenting upon the absence of the 
spurs, Grisebach remarked “this abortion, however, affords no reason 
to doubt of the constancy of the generic characters of //a/enia, since 
the genus is as well limited by the structure of its ovarium and by the 
insertion of its seeds, as by its spurs." ‘That the plant should be re- 
ferred to 7Z/a/enia there can be no doubt; but, in view of the identical 
habit of the two plants, and the frequent occurrence in ZZ. heterantha 
of some spurred corollas not distinguishable from those of 77. deflexa, 
it seems that the plants should scarcely be treated as specifically dis- 
tinct. They are, rather, extremes of a single specific type; and, in 
proposing the following disposition of the spurless form, it is felt that 
the true affinities of the plants are better shown than if they are 
treated as distinct species. 
