ly21 J Fernald,— Expedition to Nova Scotia 135 



plain plants abounded; and after following these ledges for half an 

 hour, each of us with Schizaea of the wet bogs in his mind's eye but 

 both stolidly refraining from complaint of the unpromising habitat, 

 dry ledges with their thickets of Low Blueberry, Vaccinium penn- 

 sylvanicvm, Black Huckleberry, Gaylussacia baccata, and the Nova 

 Scotian representative of Amelanckier stolonijera, with an occasional 

 damp pocket full of Carex polygama or Rhus Toxicodendron, Bissell 

 finally broke the monotony by firmly asserting that it was foolish 

 to expect Schizaea pusilla on dry ledges and that we might as well 

 give it up or hunt for a boggy shore. The latter course seemed 

 preferab e, so, remembering a wet shore we had seen from the train, 

 we retraced our steps toward it. Still hoping against hope I was 

 watching every crevice when my eye detected a puzzling Violet. 

 Dropping upon my knees, I carefully inserted my hand-pick into the 

 rock-crevice and dug out the first Violet, and with it Schizaea. Schi- 

 zaea pusilla of the bogs here growing in dry rock-crevices ! We did 

 not hunt up the boggy shore but picked and chiseled Schizaea from 

 the ledges until a violent shower drove us to shelter. 



In the shelter of the station we sorted our collections and found 

 that the plant of the gravelly lake-margin, with quill-like leaves 

 closely suggesting those of the Cape Cod Sagittaria teres, was really 

 young material of the aquatic plantain, Littorella americana Fernald, 1 

 an extremely rare plant which Mrs. Britton had collected 2 on the 

 shore of Grand Lake in 1879. The milkweed of the wet gravel 

 suggested Asclepias incarnata, var. pulchra, but it had few, very 

 short leaves (the longest 4.5-6.5 cm. long) glabrous or only minutely 

 and very remotely hirtellous beneath. I hael at times imagined that 

 there might be a specific line between A. incarnata, with its elongate, 

 essential y glabrous leaves and deeper-colored flowers, and A. pul- 

 chra Ehrh., with its oblong or elliptic leaves decidedly hairy beneath 

 and its commonly paler flowers; but this Grand Lake material and 

 a similar colony afterward found on Tusket Lake has the leaves even 

 shorter and broader (in proportion) than in A. pulchra but as smooth 

 as in A. incarnata. 



We got back to Truro long before supper and had our collections 

 in papers when the party returned from Folleigh. We had correctly 



'Rhodoia, xx. t>2 (1918). 



2 E. G. Knight as reported in Bull. Torr. Bot. CI. vii. 1 (1880); Gray, Bot. Gaz . 

 v. 4 (1880! ; E. G. Britton, Linnaean Fern Bull. iv. 17 (1896); all as L. tacustris. 



