140 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Feb. 



PRENANTHES MAINENSIS 



Notes on the Morphology, Taxonomy and Distribution 



OF this Hybrid Form. 



By Bro. M. Victorin, Longueuil College, Longueiiil, Que . 



Up to the present time very little attention has been de- 

 voted in this comitry to the study of natural hybrids. The 

 subject, however, is of the utmost importance, not only to 

 students of Mendelism, but also to the average systematist. 

 "In fact," says De Vries, "the majority of authors agree that 

 systematic and sexual affinity are essentially parallel, as they 

 are really no more than two manifestations of one and the same 

 thing ; but we have not yet succeeded in explaining the apparent 

 exceptions to this parallel." (*) If some light is ever to be 

 thrown on the subject, it will doubtless be through observa- 

 tions on natural hybrids, in widely separated groups of the 

 plant kingdom. 



We have in a previous paper (f) studied quite extensively 

 a cross of two distant species of Lysimachia : L. terrestris (L.) 

 B.S.P. X L. thyrsiflora L., and hinted that the recently proposed 

 genus Naumhurgia, created to account for L. thyrsifora, was 

 not founded in nature, since the plant hybridizes freely with 

 other Lysimachia species. The writer knows such hybrid to 

 occur constantly in Chateauguy. Que., and Professor M. L. 

 Fernald, of the Gray Herbaritmi, states that he has collected 

 it in Maine, and also in Prince Edward Island. 



The present paper will deal with another interesting hybrid 

 in the genus Preiiaiithes (Compositae) , which is of rare occur- 

 ence and has never received close stud5^ 



In a detailed botanical survey conducted during the sum- 

 mers of 1913 and 1914 along the coastal portion of the county 

 of Temiscouata, Que., our attention was called to various forms 

 of Prenanthes growing intermingled in a salt marsh at Anse a 

 Persi, near Riviere-du-Loup. Specimens were collected and a 

 preliminary study showed the bulk of the crop to be typical 



*Hugo de Vries, "Mutation Theory," II., 593-599 (English translation). 



tFr. Marie Victorin, "Notes sur Detix Cas d'Hvbridisma Nature!." Nat. Can. XXXIX., 

 177-189. 



