THE PLANT WOELD 43 



stratum, here principally leaf mould kept in the condition of slush by 

 the water from a seepage sjiring. In this carbonaceous mud I have 

 several times since 1893 found them late in October, on the occasions 

 of visits to this station for blooming witch hazel. 



In the fall of 1894 I gathered a handful of these tubers, and made 

 an attempt at transplanting this plant to several favorable situations 

 nearer Winona than Queen's Bluff, which is eighteen miles below Win- 

 ona, and is, so far as I have ascertained after more than eleven years of 

 waiting, its only station east of the Rocky Mountains. The failure of 

 this attempt is to be regretted the more, since the freshets produced in 

 the upper Mississippi basin by the torrential rains of June 12th and 

 13th, 1899, have left deposits of sand and earth more than a foot deep 

 over this little isolated patch of Claytonia, as I learned on my last visit 

 in the late fall of 1899. Whether any fraction of this colony has suc- 

 cessfully escaped destruction by that flood, remains to be determined 

 by future search. 



It seems superfluous to point out the close similarity of the vege- 

 tative system of this plant and that of the common potato, Solanum tu- 

 berosum. That it has so long been considered an annual herb, seems 

 largely due to the fact that the stolons, the presence of which is noted 

 in some of the descriptions, are quite slender and delicate, and after 

 drying become so brittle that most herbarium specimens show neither 

 them nor the tubers. From va.y extended observations, it is very prob- 

 able that the principal means of propagation of this plant is by just 

 these tubers. Indeed, so far as this little colony is concerned, they 

 seem to have been the only means, certainly since I have found the 

 patch. For, of the hundreds of plants collected on the several trips, 

 not a single ripe or even partly developed seed could be found, despite 

 the fact that the plants at the times of collecting were always largely 

 past bloom, and every plant was expressly searched and examined with 

 care. In not a single case was there evidence that fertilization had 

 taken place. Whether this sterility was due to the unfavorable climate 

 or to absence of the right insect visitors, remains an unanswered (pies- 

 tion. 



Winuna, iMinnesota, February, 1901. 



