34 Rhodora [FEBRUARY 
he can in the spring welcome the coming guest before and after the 
time when the whistle blows, literally or metaphorically, there is 
no daylight for speeding the parting guest in the autumn. Once, 
on November 4, 1900, when riding on my bicycle from Malden to 
Revere Beach and back, I made note of the flowers I saw in bloom, 
conspicuous enough to be visible as I went by; there were 22, not 
counting two manifestly different “mustards”’ that I did not recognize 
specifically. 
In November, 1913, for the first time I was able to give some day- 
time, every day, to making notes of this kind, and the present paper is 
the result of these notes, and similar ones in November, 1914, in the 
town of Eastham, Barnstable County, Massachusetts. In each year 
I was away from Eastham part of the month; in 1913 the observations 
cover the period from the seventeenth to the thirtieth, in 1914 from 
the first to the twentieth. Mr. Torrey records finding some species 
only in a single limited station, and it is of course probable that similar 
stations for other species were overlooked, both in his case and in mine; 
completeness in such matters is impossible. Mr. Torrey’s list is 
given by common names, “omitting Latin titles,—— somewhat un- 
willingly, I confess —" he says, but I think I have rightly identified 
all the species except one, “common blue violet"; one looks back with 
a mild melancholy to the good times, now gone forever, when there 
was such a thing as the “common blue violet.” 
In the following tabulation all the species observed by Mr. Torrey 
and myself are in a single list, in the order of the Manual Check List; 
there are four vertical columns at the right; a check in the first indi- 
cates the presence of the species in Mr. Torrey's November, 1888 list; 
in the second column, its occurrence in November, 1913; in the third, 
its occurrence in November, 1914; in the fourth column are indicated 
the species that were able, by the unusually mild weather of the close 
of 1913, to continue blooming into December of that year. 
Nov.| Nov.| Nov.| Dec. 
'88 | 13 | "M | 713 
Spiranthes cernua "X" uL. 
Polygonellaarticulata . . . . . . . . . | 
Polygonum aviculare + 
Polygonum Persicaria 
T Chenopodium carinatum 
Phytolacca decandra 
TT 
