214 Rhodora [NOVEMBER 
Lake Michigan. These low sand ridges of beach and shore deposits 
bear a scattered growth of pines and oaks, and are sufficiently open 
and sunny to admit a number of the plants common to the drier 
prairies beyond the limits of the old lake basin. It is these low 
ridges that characterize the western part of the sand region. In the 
dune region proper, where the surface is broken by high sand hills 
enclosing ponds or shallow depressions of moister ground, I have 
never met with an example of this thistle. This dune area lies 
mainly east of the new city of Gary, and as the region west of this 
place is largely used for factories of various kinds and cut up by a net- 
work of railroads and switches, the thistle here is likely soon to be- 
come extinct. But it fares better south and west of Chicago in the 
prairie region, where it still occurs in the more rolling parts of pas- 
tures and meadows, or in lower sand areas of the drift formation, 
particularly in railway enclosures fenced off from the surrounding 
prairie before the land had been touched by the plow. Here it is one 
of the few native denizens of the prairie that seem able to compete with 
an introduced vegetation. It may return again to ground. from which 
it had been excluded by cultivation, when this is seeded down for a 
time for pasture or meadow, and left a few years untilled. It is 
greatly helped in this by its copious plumose pappus for the wind 
dispersion of its seeds. It has the additional advantage of early 
fruiting, some of its seeds maturing in a meadow before the grass may 
be cut. It thus takes on the character of a pasture or meadow thistle, 
and grows successfully beside the white and the red clover, timothy, 
and the most common meadow and pasture grasses of drier grounds, 
Poa pratensis and P. compressa. 
CuicAGo, ILLINOIS. 
NOTE ON DESMODIUM CANESCENS AND HYOSCYAMUS 
NIGER. 
WALTER DEANE. 
I HAVE read with much interest Prof. M. L. Fernald’s Notes from 
the Phaenogamic Herbarium of the New England Botanical Club,— 
I, in Ruopora for September, 1910, and succeeding Notes will be most 
welcome, They give definiteness to the records and they will stimu- 
