i Me RE Ne ee ee Se. RR Ry cee me 
a 130 Rhodora [JULY 
k: quite smooth or with the merest suggestion of scabridity on the angles, 
F while 4 have a more definite scabrousness on the young branches. 
: Only 2 sheets, however, have the angles sufficiently scabrous to be 
comparable with the bulk of European specimens. One of these 
À sheets, in which the branches are conspicuously scabrous, is the type 
E of E. sylvaticum, var. squarrosum A. A. Eaton! from near Nome City, 
3 Alaska. The other material is from Parry Sound on Georgian Bay, 
7 Ontario. These two plants, from near Cape Nome and from Parry 
3 i Sound, are inseparable from characteristic Furopean specimens and 
must pass as essentially typical E. sylvaticum. Occasionally in 
7 Europe the branches are smooth as in the American plant, but the 
É: European material has so generally scabrous branches that few Euro- 
2 pean authors, if any, have made note of smooth branches in the 
3 European plant. On the other hand, the tremendous preponderance 
P 
of specimens with smooth branches in America (188 out of 194 sheets 
now before the writer) indicates that the smooth-branched tendency 
4 is the normal variation in North America, and as such it should be 
definitely designated as a geographic variety. Sg 
Just as the European plant differs in the degree of branching, the 
American is highly variable, but in general these variations in the 
: degree of branching are of minor importance and for the most part 
: not of sufficient constancy to merit special notice. It so happens, 
however, that the only name available for the smooth-branched 
d American plant is one which was given by Milde to one of the less 
- common variations, a northern tendency in which the branches are 
; simple or subsimple or only very slightly forked. This, the plant 
found in Greenland, Labrador and much of the cooler region of Canada, 
was described very definitely by Milde as var. pauciramosum “ Caulis 
erectus, inferne nudus, sublaevis, rami subsimplices. Labradoria 
(herb. Breutel). (Fig. 2.)”2 The figure illustrating this variety 
shows it to be the characteristic plant of much of Labrador, Newfound- 
land and Quebec. This more slender form of the American plant, 
with the simple or subsimple smooth branches, and a very similar, 
though often larger, development of the same variation, occurs south- 
ward to Massachusetts, Connecticut and Ohio and very locally in the 
Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia. 
A commoner American plant, however, has the branches very 
eae ae 
1 A. A. Eaton, Fern Bull. ix. 36 (1901), 
? Milde, Mon. Equiset. 292, t. 9, fig. 2 (1865). 
