60 THE PIvANT WORLD 



Briefer Articles. 



TWO NEW STATIONS FOR ELLIOTTIA. 



It may interest some of the readers of The Plant World to know 

 that during my travels in Georgia last summer I obtained evidence in a 

 rather unusual way of two stations unknown to botanists for the rare 

 shrub of the Heath family, Elliottia raceinosa, some account of which ap- 

 peared in this journal last May. On my travels I carried with me a num- 

 ber of photographs taken in Georgia during the two preceding years, 

 among them some of the Elliottia, including the one which was repro- 

 duced in the May number. These photographs I showed to several of 

 my friends and other people I met, and in Valdosta in September I found 

 a gentleman who recognized the Elliottia as a plant he had seen growling 

 near his home at Stillmore, in Emanuel County. Later in the same month, 

 in Moultrie, I met a gentleman who claimed to have seen the same plant 

 in Screven County. 



Both gentlemen were positive in their identification of the Elliottia, 

 and their description of its habitat and time of flowering agreed with my 

 own observations, so that I have no reason to doubt their statements. It 

 is noteworthy in this connection that Screven and Emanuel Counties are 

 both adjacent to Burke County, in which Elliottia was first discovered, 

 and to Bulloch County, in which I found it last year, as well as to each 

 other. Roland M. Harper. 



College Poii)t, N. Y. 



A HARBINGER OF SPRING. 



When we speak of certain flowers as being harbingers of spring the 

 mind unconsciously pictures a freshly green bank whereon are peeping 

 forth bright-petaled and fragrant blossoms emerging to the accompani- 

 ment of the bluebird's cheery call, but as a matter of fact the real fore- 

 runner of our floral procession has neither poetic name nor bright-hued 

 or fragrant flowers to recommend it, nor is its coming heralded by 

 bird song. Weeks before even early spring, with its willow catkins and 

 crimson maples, the skunk cabbage has braved the rigors of winter and 

 sent up along the swamp-border its hooded clusters of minute flowers. 

 Even if covered with snow or bound solid in an icy covering it melts a 

 tiny chamber for itself and its vital activities go on with an energy per- 

 haps acquired by some ancestor of glacial times. That it had such an 

 ancestor is attested by a fossil representative that must have been near of 

 kin, in the Miocene lake beds of Nevada. Certain it is that although 

 the last of its kind it possesses a vigor of constitution that is equalled by 



