38 THE PLANT WORLD. 



ment a mile or more to the southward of the town, I was surprised to 

 find a strong colony of Collomia linearis. This plant, so widely dis- 

 persed in the Rocky Mountain region and beyond it, is only recorded 

 east of the Mississippi from New Brunswick, where it can hardly be 

 more than adventive. But on the Wisconsin side of the great river 

 named, it has come to find a congenial soil, and to make itself quite 

 at home. I would not venture to say as much of Pentsteinon tubiflorus, 

 of which I found a good specimen in flower, growing among hazel 

 bushes near the railway, some five miles south of Prairie du Chien. 

 It is probably adventive there, from the south rather than from the 

 west. This large and showy species was, in Asa Gray's time, known 

 only from Kansas and Arkansas. Britton and Brown add Missouri to 

 its known range, but I found it both luxuriant and plentiful this year 

 on low prairies of southern Illinois; and the finding of a single speci- 

 men in southern Wisconsin suggests the possibility of its being 

 inigratory. 



To Hypericum Kalmianum a curious range is attributed, in the 

 books; but there appears to be no record of its occurrence to the 

 westward of Michigan, yet I found it common in the valley of the 

 LaCrosse river, not far from Sparta, Wis. And it was equally inter- 

 esting to discover, in a wooded swamp of the lower Wisconsin, the 

 most extensive colony that I have ever met with, of so rare and pecu- 

 liar acrucifer as the Lake Water-cress {Neobeckia aqiiatica Greene). I 

 do not know of its having been recorded heretofore as occurring in 

 Wisconsin, though it is credited to Minnesota; but it is a plant for 

 which very few localities seem to be known in any State. 



I shall conclude these notes by the repetition of an item published 

 by me almost twenty years since, and one which the newer generation 

 appears to have overlooked. Perhaps the rarest of North American 

 asclepiads is Asclepias Meadii. In 1878, when the volume of the 

 Synoptical Flora containing this family was issued, only two stations 

 for this species were known, one in Illinois, the other in Iowa. In 

 the spring of 1879 I detected the plant on a piece of wild land near 

 Lancaster, Wis., and recorded the fact in the fifth volume of the 

 Botanical Gazette ; and yet, in all the recent cataloguing of our 

 asclepiads, only Illinois and Iowa are credited with this most local 

 plant; a species which I alone among botanists now living have seen 

 in the field. The specimens collected by me are partly in my own 

 herbarium, and partly in that of Harvard University, as I at least sup- 

 pose ; for a good specimen was, at the time, sent to Dr. Gray to estab- 

 lish in his herbarium this new station for so great a rarity. 



Catholic University, D. C. 



