106 THE PLANT WOKLD 



noted and means taken for their protection, lectures should be given 

 and literature distributed. There are enough such clubs already in exis- 

 tence to carry out the needed measures with success, and it is to these 

 that this article is addressed as an appeal. 

 Brooki^yn, n. y. 



THE YELLOW WATER LILY OF FLORIDA, 



By a. H. CurTiss. 



AMONG all the plants of the United States, I doubt if one can be 

 pointed out that x>resents more points of interest to a student of 

 botany than does Florida's yellow water lily, Nymphaea flava 

 Leitner [Gastalia flava Greene). Though a conspicuous plant and one 

 that must have been observed by white people for centuries, it was un- 

 known to botanists until the publication of Audubon's Birds of North 

 America. In one of the plates there was represented a Nymphaea with 

 yellow flowers, and as Audubon was known to be too exact to paint a 

 white flower yellow. Dr. Leitner went so far as to name it. Yet for many 

 years afterwards botanists had no positive evidence of its existence. 



In the year 1875, I was employed by the Department of Agricul- 

 ture to collect Southern woods for the Centennial Exposition at Phila- 

 delphia, and in May found myself at Jacksonville, Florida. I came 

 across the yellow water lily, made some specimens of it and sent them 

 to Dr. George Vasey, the botanist of the Department. Dr. Yasey never 

 wrote me anything about the specimens, and I do not know what became 

 of them. Two years later more specimens were collected in or near the 

 same locality by Mrs. Mary Treat, and I presume she sent them for 

 identification to Professor Gray, to whom in those days nearly all who 

 were interested in botany appealed for assistance, and never appealed in 

 vain. At any rate the credit of discovering the species fell to Mrs. Mary 

 Treat, who, as she writes me, made her "first studies of Nyrirpliaea flava 

 near Green Cove Springs in the winter of 1874 and '75." I do not know 

 when she obtained flower specimens, but think it was in 1877 that she 

 wrote up the subject for Harper's Magazine. Green Cove Springs is about 

 thirty miles south of Jacksonville. The exact range of the species I do 

 not know, but presume it has grown in most of the creeks emptying into 

 St. John's river which are affected by the tides, and the latter are felt for 

 a hundred miles from its mouth. 



Strange as were the circumstances attending the introduction of this 

 plant to the botanical world, I believe there is a stranger final chapter in 

 its history yet to be written. It seems to me inevitable that this rare and 

 beautiful species must soon become extinct, because the places where it 



