140 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Nov. 



dioicum. On reaching the woods, I found there no river or 

 stream or streamlet, nor any spot at all where one would expect 

 that species of Thalictrum ; but I was slow in reaching the wood- 

 land destination because of the interesting objects botanical 

 which I met with along the railway. The botanist in a prairie 

 country always makes the railroads his highway as a pedestrian, 

 because along such line only can he hope to find strips of prairie 

 land that were never overturned by the plow, and where remnants 

 of the original native plants of the region have stood chances of 

 survival. 



The first half-rrile or so eastward from Strathroy by the 

 railway is low prairie land, at least now, though almost doubtless 

 it may have been wet timber land originally, the Sydenham 

 River near which Strathroy was built being well timbered, Hke 

 other streams of the region, all along its course. To the plant 

 associations of this half-mile of low moist prairie I shall return 

 later; but the boundary of this low land, at the eastward, is a 

 low but broad ridge of dry and light sandy soil, perhaps a glacial 

 deposit, or else an ancient bank of the river now a half-mile 

 distant. The railway has been cut through this sandy ridge, and 

 the land on the sides of the track is prairie never yet broken by 

 the plow. On the northwestward slope of this slight elevation, 

 under that protection from cattle which the railway fences 

 secure to many an easily extinguished native flower, I recognized, 

 even before I had come very near the spot, a fine colony of an 

 old favorite not seen by me before for many a year, Erythrocoma 

 triflora, the Three-flowered Avens, or Three-flowered Geum. This 

 is one of several beautiful early spring flowers which botanists 

 and lovers of wild flowers in Wisconsin, and in Michigan a genera- 

 tion ago, knew as the earliest things of spring, and they sought it 

 as they did the Pasque Flower, Pulsatilla Niittalliana and 

 Ranunculus rhomboideus on the bleakest and coldest exposures 

 of the knolls of glacial drift, where alone either one of the three 

 was ever to be seen. Of course in the middle of June in western 

 Ontario the Erythrocoma was past its flowering, but the tufts of 

 soft feathery coma, that as an appendage to the head of seeds is 

 almost as red as the flower itself these remain until the begin- 

 ning of summer and render a colonv of the plants a thing of 

 beauty as long as they last. 



On this same slope I observed a single plant of a violet that 

 I had not met with before, nor have I seen it since in any later 

 travels. As to foliage alone it might have been V. firnbriatula, 

 but it had three good marks to preclude its being referred to that 

 common and rather widely dispersed species. Its stout root- 

 stock was widely and multifariously branched, so that the plant 

 as a whole formed quite a broad tuft. Entirelv past the period 



