1910] The Ottawa Naturalist. 2 7 



grayish colour, and smooth. The flowers are produced in large 

 panicles at the top of the stalks: they are larger than those of 

 the former sorts, and have tive white petals which soon fall ofiE, 

 and a great number of white stamina with yellow summits. 

 This flowers in June, and the seeds ripen in August." 



As a description, this is specious rather than definitive; yet 

 it comes twenty times nearer being definite than all which had 

 ever been printed about the plant during the 135 vears that had 

 intervened between Cornut and Miller. Let us see Vv^hat this 

 description tells us that may help somewhat toward a placing 

 of the plant. That its roots are fibrous and dark-coloured may 

 assure us that it v/as not one of our numerous meadov/-rues that 

 are yellow-rooted. Its attaining the height of three or four feet 

 is a statement that might be helpful ; for, in Canada where this 

 thing came from there are white-stamened kinds that com- 

 monly attain that height, and more, and iheve are others that 

 are exceptionally large plants of their kind if two feel high. 

 That its leaves were those of columbines is of no moment. Most 

 American meadow-rues, and many of those of Europe and of 

 Asia, are columbine-leaved. But when we are informed that 

 the T. Canadense, Mill., has leaves that are "grayish" and 

 also "smooth," we are compelled to picture in our minds a 

 Thalictrum with glaucescent foliage, that is, if we are instructed 

 as to the terms that were in use in MilleV's dav and earlier for 

 designating that which we of a later time knov/ as glaucous. 

 There are v/hite-stamened Canadian Thalictrums in plenty, the 

 foliage of which is deep-green or dark-green, and one or two that 

 are glaucescent-leaved. We have now the word of Miller that 

 the real T. Canadense, involving T. Cornuti, Linn., is a plant 

 with light blue-green foliage, and glabrous, at least above. 

 Another very useful item in his account of the plant is, that its 

 flowers are produced in large panicles. This definitely excludes 

 several rather northerly Canadian meadow-rues the leafy stems 

 of which can not be said to end in any panicle at all, but in an 

 umbel of only two or three sometimes solitary large white- 

 stamened flowers; yet all these manifestly distinct plants were 

 formerly catalogued as T. Cornuti, which, by Miller's testimony, 

 they can not be. And, finally, it is evident by the same authority 

 that the plant as they had it in Europe in the seventeenth century 

 and in the eighteenth was hermaphrodite, for the authority seems 

 to say that stamens and pistils were in all the flowers. Miller's 

 account does not indeed define anything. We can not, in the 

 light of it, enable ourselves to say just -what one of the Canadian 

 white-stamened Thalictrums it was, though by the same token 

 we can seem to see in the Canadian flora a number of members 

 of that group which can not be referred thereto. 



