108 Rhodora [May 



Although the water was high, there was sufficient peaty, sandy 

 and cobbly beach exposed for us comfortably to follow the margin of 

 Trefry's Lake. At the upper border of the beach Utricidaria sub- 

 ulata was so abundant as to form an interrupted orange-yellow band 

 and with it, as at every station we subsequently found (nearly every 

 lake visited in Yarmouth County), was U. eleistogama, the extreme 

 plant with tiny creamy or milk-white or sometimes buff-tinged, spur- 

 less corollas, but with many of the flowers intermediate in size, form 

 and color and often with short spurs. Such transitional colonies 

 were repeatedly examined by Long and me; White and Bean, when 

 they came, saw the two with their intermediates at Cedar Lake 

 where White secured a beautiful photograph including the tiniest 

 extreme (no larger than a slender "insect-pin"); and Dr. Graves, 

 when at last he came, had his opportunity to collect the transitional 

 series at Salmon Lake. These repeated experiences naturally de- 

 stroyed the last lingering illusions that U. eleistogama is a species 

 distinct from U. subulata. It is not even a good variety, being 

 merely a cleistogamous form of U. subulata. 



Since the preceding paragraph was written it has been gratifying 

 to find that Bicknell's experience on Martha's Vineyard was so 

 similar to our own. "Near Edgartown, on Martha's Vineyard, on 

 September 30, 1912, there fell to me a most favorable opportunity 

 of observing the extent of variation natural to the flowers of S[eti- 

 seapclla] eleistogama among the plants of a single colony. The situa- 

 tion was a few square feet of damp sandy soil in open ground. In 

 the weakest examples, some of them not over 1 cm. high, the corollas, 

 'not larger than a pinhead,' were subglobose or saccate, and white or 

 faintly bluish in color, precisely as descriptions require them to 

 be. But in stronger plants the corollas increased doubly in size and 

 came also, by an exact gradation, to a distinctly two-lipped form, 

 the blunt lower lip dusky or purplish lineate and with an evident 

 white spur, the most open flowers showing an unmistakable yellow- 

 ish tinge. The spur, obsolete in the smallest corollas, varied in the 

 larger ones from rounded to oblong and acutish; in one instance 

 it was bifid." 



"In very small examples of S. subulata, unmistakable as to iden- 

 tity because components of colonies of the typical plant, the corolla, 

 perhaps from arrested development, may be somewhat abortive and 



