PRAIRIE-FLOWERS OF EARLY SPRING. 85 



thoroughness with which the pussy-willow prepares for the coming 

 spring, even before the first chill of autumn thrills the summer air, it 

 will be unnecessary to dwell upon this fact. Even in these October 

 days, when the leaves are chasing each other down the roadway, 

 driven by the cruel wind, there are bright promises of another spring- 

 time left behind upon the shrubs and trees. The foliage may fall, but 

 its work remains. Their long summer days of toil are not for naught. 

 Within the closely knit covering of the bud sit the germ of a future 

 branch with its leaves defined and its flowers planned. Those who see 

 only evidences of death and decay in the leaf-stripped tree are surface- 

 sighted. A plant is never more itself than when it is fully prepared 

 for a period of repose. It is now most independent and most highly 

 charged with what the physicist would call the energy of position. 

 The plants, therefore, that bloom early in the spring are not idlers 

 through the balance of the year ; they ripen their seed, or, in other 

 words, rear up a fine family of children. Each offspring, provided 

 with an outfit for the early struggles of life in the shape of starch, and 

 oil, and protoplasm, is invited to shift for itself. More than this, the 

 mother-plant, if it is the plan that she shall live on, spreads new leaves 

 to the sunshine, and the work of food-making goes on during every 

 day until a store of nourishment is packed away for use in the early 

 growth of the plant the following spring. As a rule, spring flowers 

 are made out of last year's material, and, in this sense, are not as fresh 

 and new as those that come later in the season. 



Over fifty pairs of anxious eyes were watching last spring for the 

 first flowers of the year, and it is safe to say that not many days elapsed 

 between the appearance of the first blooms of a species and the time 

 they were discovered. It was none other than the hepatica, or liver- 

 leaf, that first opened its delicate blossoms to the chill air. This was 

 on April 6th, and many days before the snow-banks had silently stolen 

 away. The fact that this little forerunner of warmer and better days 

 has been recently uprooted by botanists and transplanted in another 

 genus seems only to quicken its pulse and make it breathe the air of 

 April more freely. Hepatica acutiloba (DC), of my earlier botanical 

 days, has changed to Anemone acutiloba (Lawson). It by any other 

 binomial botanical title would bloom as early and smell as sweet. Its 

 twin sister has undergone a more violent treatment, and, instead of 

 Hepatica tribola (Chaix), it is settled among the wind-flowers as Anem- 

 one hepatica, where the immortal Linnaeus had placed it a century ago. 

 The fineness and even brittleness of the thread by which a species 

 is hung is well illustrated by these two hepaticas. Without con- 

 sidering how minute were the characteristics upon which the genus 

 Hepatica was founded by Dillenius, let us see in what the two Ameri- 

 can species differ. Dr. Gray, in his " School and Fleld-Book," says : 

 " Hepatica triloba (round-lobed hepatica), leaves, with three broad and 

 rounded lobes, appearing later than the flowers and lasting over win- 



