230 Rhodora [DECEMBER è 
Since the White Mountains and the Green Mountains have been 
so extensively explored by botanists for fully a century and in all this 
time, so far as records show, no specimens of Alchemilla have ever been 
found there, it has long seemed evident that Pursh's report, based, as 
he himself said, merely on a recollection of some plant which he had 
seen, must have been an error and should be classed with his long 
discredited reports of Dryas integrifolia (D. tenella) and Pleurogyne 
rotata (Swertia pusilla) from the White Mountains. 
Recently, however, in the North American Flora Rydberg has given 
the range of Alchemilla alpina in America as: “from Greenland to 
Miquelon and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.” ! As to 
the origin of the Miquelon record we have no information, but the 
species is not included in Delamare, Renauld, and Cardot’s Flora 
Miquelonensis (1888), in Bonnet’s Florule des Isles Saint Pierre et 
Miquelon,’ nor in Waghorne’s publications on Newfoundland and the 
French Islands. In his statement of range above quoted Rydberg 
does not include western North America, but in the Gray Herbarium 
there is a specimen collected by C. H. Demetrio, July 5, 1888, “On 
the trail to the Lake of the Clouds, Custer Co., Colorado," a station 
which, it would seem, is not generally known since there is no mention 
of the occurrence of the plant in Colorado either in Rydberg’s Flora 
of Colorado or in Coulter and Nelson’s Manual of Rocky Mountain 
Botany. 
Although the records of A. alpina from New Hampshire and Ver- 
mont are probably errors, the fact that the plant has once been found 
in Colorado and is known in Greenland indicates that it should be 
watched for in Labrador, Newfoundland, and on the mountains of 
Gaspé. 
The only Alchemilla clearly indigenous in northeastern America is 
the polymorphous A. vulgaris L., which by some European authors is 
considered as separable into many closely similar though distinct 
species, but by others is regarded as a single species with numerous 
sub-species, varieties and forms. A study of the plants in the field 
in Newfoundland and Labrador, and of all the available herbarium 
material from the Northeast convinces the writers that the characters 
commonly relied upon to separate species (mainly those of pubescence) 
are so highly variable as entirely to obscure any practical specific 
1N. A. Fl, XXII. 379 (1908). 
2 Journ. Botanique, I. (1887). 
