78 The Ottawa Naturalist. [June 



it seems difficult to find any g-ood ground for admitting species 

 of so little affinity as those oi Arciophila, and still crediting the 

 genus to Trinius. And the species oi ArctophiLa have themselves 

 been transferred from one g-enus to another. Thus we find them as 

 members of Poa^ Glyceria, Graphephoriim and finally of (?t//>^;^//V/w. 



Considered by themselves the species of Ruprecht's ^7r/fl/)///7rt 

 constitute an excellent little genus, and we might cite Ruprecht's 

 own words, when he proposed the genus in his " Flores Samoje- 

 dorum cisuralensium " : 



'^Arciophila a Catabrosa (a>o/V/e) praesertim differt glumarum 

 conformatione et longitudine, hac nota etiam et insuper valvulis 

 ecostatis a Glyceria R Br. recedit. Atropis Trin, [P. distans) 

 Catabrosce quoad glumas proxima, spiculas habet (saltem in statu 

 virgineo) lineares, fere teretes ; in Arctophila nostra semper ex 

 ovato-oblongcE vel lanceolatfe. E conditione glumarum generum 

 series fortasse sequens : Dupontia, Arctophila, Poa, Atropis, Cata- 

 brosa, Phippsia, Coleanthus. Conjunctioni Arctophilce cum Poa 

 obstant : valvulae dorso concavae vel saltem minus compressae ; 

 flosculi lana numquam cincti, nee ad nervos dorsales sericei, sed 

 ad callum more Avenacearuvi pilis rigidis brevibus obsiti ; valvula 

 inferior apice vix integerrima, sed margo plerumque irregulariter 

 denticulatus et erosus, saltem crenulatus et apex, sa^pe obtusus 

 vel truncatus ; habitus etiam nobilior colore fulvo paniculas sajpe 

 intermixto ; spiculaj majores plerumque et flosculi demum patuli, 

 remotiusculi." 



The species that are best known are : Arctophila jnlva (Trin.) 

 Rupr., A. pendtilina (Lsstad.) Ands. and A. e^usa Lge., especially 

 the first of these since the Greenlandish plant, A. effiisa, was for 

 many years considered identical with A. pendulina by Fries, 

 Grisebach and several other authors. 



Both A. fulva and A. pendulina possess spikelets with as 

 many as six or seven flowers, at least the spikelets fully developed, 

 but it is not uncommon to find two or three-flowered spikelets 

 upon the basal rays of a panicle in which all the others are from 

 five- to seven-flowered. Typical A. pendulina has usually 5- 

 to 7- flowered spikelets, as figured in Flora Danica, and 

 the species \diff"ers in this respect from A. ejff^nsa, in which the 

 number of flowers does not exceed three, and there are often only 



