THE PIvANT WORIvD 277 



On this perfect day, when over the blue sky the white clouds sailed — 



" Like ships upon the sea," 



I thought why should any one be cooped up in the hot city ? Why, 

 when he escapes therefrom, must he feel it ever necessary to seek distant 

 scenes and at great expense ? Here, within fifteen minutes of his home, 

 he can leave noise, dust, heat, all the municipal abominations, to find 

 " the bliss of solitude." 



We met not a single person in our voyage. Our vasculum was filled 

 to the brim. The only sounds were the splash of a sunning turtle (whose 

 voice was not heard in the land!) or the plunge of a surprised musk-rat. 

 I said to my guide, the professor, " I have, for the time, knocked off 

 twenty years from my age! " So, humming old songs, telling old stories, 

 full of the sweet air, and blessed with juvenile appetite, we reached 

 home. To botanist and wood-lover alike, we commend our inland rivers. 



Prof. W. Whitman Bailey. 



THE WHITE PRICKLY POPPY IN NORTHWESTERN OHIO. 



September 13th the writer was called to the beautiful home of Mr. 

 W. H. Doll, one of the leading druggists in St. Marys, Ohio, where the 

 lady of the house, who is very much interested in flowers and plants in 

 general, directed his attention to a plant growing in her flower beds that 

 .she pronounced an unknown one to her, but correctly supposed to belong 

 to the Poppy family. I at once recognized it as Argemone alba, the 

 White Prickly Poppj', but was not a little astonished to find this plant, a 

 decidedly western and southern species whose range is given by Britton 

 & Brown's Flora as South Dakota to Texas, Arizona and Mexico, east to 

 Florida, in northwestern Ohio as a seemingly well established, although 

 local, plant that was growing, as Mrs. Doll told me, for about two or 

 three years as a beautiful but nevertheless unwelcome weed in her garden. 

 She accounted for its appearance on her grounds by the fact that a hitherto 

 untouched somewhat dry and very hard spot along a stone wall, had 

 recently been dug up, and suggested that the seeds of the plant might 

 have lain dormant below this hard layer. But as she has been living 

 about thirty years already on this property without having noticed a plant 

 like this before, it would be an extraordinary case of longevity and preser- 

 vation of the germinating faculty of such a tiny and not at all hard-shelled 

 seed. I rather think that by the digging up of this spot a suitable place 

 was afforded for the germination of some stray seeds of Argemone alba, but 

 do not imdertake to explain the sudden appearance of the seeds here, 

 never having learned of any previous occurrence of this species in Ohio. 

 It seems to be one of those often observed but never sufficiently explained 

 instances of over-leaping of wide spaces by wandering plants which sud- 



