VOL. IV.] Sierra Nevada Plants in Coast Range. 169 



the earliest possible date. Man brings with him so many dis- 

 turbing elements that a few years may almost change the face of 

 nature. Of these disturbing factors, one of the greatest is a flock 

 of sheep. Not only does it destroy or render very scarce many 

 of the native plants, but in California, where sheep are kept on 

 the public domain, they are fed in the spring months on the 

 foothills, are driven to the high mountains as the season advances, 

 and back as the snow threatens, to the stubble fields and tule 

 marshes of the lowlands. In these peregrinations they distribute 

 in varying proportion the seeds of many of the plants growing in 

 the regions passed over. There is scarcely a spot except upon 

 the highest peaks, where sheep have not penetrated and altered 

 to some extent the character of the flora. 



The railway lines are another potent factor in the disturbance 

 of distribution, the construction trains, which transport rock 

 and earth for embankments, offering special facilities for the 

 wandering of species, but their action being more definite and 

 much more recent, is in most cases readily understood and causes 

 no confusion, as for instance in the invasion of the San Joaquin 

 Valley by the plants of the Mojave Desert now in active 

 progress. 



The species enumerated below are in most cases additions to 

 the known flora of the Coast Range or have their range much 

 extended southward. It does not comprise all the additions col- 

 lected, the grasses, Cyperaceae, etc., being neglected, and even of 

 the other orders a considerable number have escaped reckoning 

 on account of the distribution of the plants in the herbarium, no 

 list having been made, and only those included which could be 

 recalled from memory and readily verified. The greater part of 

 them were obtained from Snow Mountain in L^ake County in two 

 visits; one made by Mr. Brandegee in June, 1891; the second by 

 the writer late in August, 1892. 



Snow Mountain is in Lake County and nearly due north a little 

 more than a hundred miles from San Francisco. It rises to a 

 height of nearly 7000 feet, and the depth of the winter snow and 

 the degree of cold is apparently quite as great as at the summit 

 of the Donner Pass in the central Sierra Nevada. The plants 

 are still insufficiently known, the top being covered with snow 



