1910] The Ottawa Naturalist. 141 



of its showv flowering, the apetalous summer fl.owers were as far 

 as possible from standing upright as they do in that species; 

 they lay close along the ground and on slender peduncles clothed 

 with long soft hairs. Here, then, were three abundantly sufficient 

 characters by which to have distinguished this violet as new. At 

 a later date, only a quarter-mile away, growing as its habit is on 

 sandy but damp ground, I saw plenty of V. fmhriatula, and here 

 as always with its simple short rootstock, upright apetalous 

 flowers and pods borne among the leaves, and the peduncles 

 stout without hairiness. I am careful to describe both the locali- 

 ties, and the peculiar marks of these plants, in the hope that 

 botanisis resident in western Ontario may have an eye to their 

 further investigation, especially in perhaps early May, when they 

 should be in petaliferous flower. 



A little beyond this sandy ridge the railway embankment, 

 only a little elevated above the level of the plain, was thickly 

 beset with a dwarf wild rose, now in the middle of June, well in 

 flower. I supposed it to be a colony of my Rosa pratincola, an 

 almost herbaceous rose abundant all over the whole prairie 

 region of the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries but this 

 identification will perchance not hold good. It was too early 

 for the fruits, and the plants after all seemed rather too com- 

 pactly colonized for R. pratincola. 



At this good point of my route to the w^oodland I took 

 observation of a grain field as occupying acres on one side along 

 the railway, and on the opposite an equal stretch of pasture land, 

 the pasture being more or less elevated and sandy, this ridge of 

 drift, if such it be, sloping aw^ay and becoming evanescent at a 

 distance of not many rods from where I stood w^ithin the railway 

 enclosure. In this elevated and sandy part of the pasture close 

 at hand there were blackberry bushes and a scattered colony of 

 sumach, the members of this low of stature, much smaller than 

 those on the hills around the tamarack swamp, and they seemed 

 laden with last year's panicles of different shape as w^ell as heavier 

 than those of the other. As seen from a short distance, I was 

 hoping this might turn out to be a member of the Rhus glabra 

 alliance; possibly my R. arhuscula of the glacial drift in northern 

 Indiana not so very far away; but an inspection of the shrub, 

 with its branches just budding out into leaf, resulted in the cer- 

 tainty that this also was of the R. iyphina alliance, possibly the 

 same, specifically, as the other; possibly distinct. 



The nearer approach to the woods that I had set forth to 

 reach disclosed evidence that on this side of the prairie also, as 

 on the opposite side of the town, the original Hmits of it had been 

 somewhat extended, and that of the woodland correspondingly 

 restiicted since the first settlement of the countrv : for now, what 



