156 W. S. Cooper 



Greenland. In North America it ranges from Labrador south- 

 ward to New Jersey and is found on the eastern shores of Hud- 

 son Bay. It is not recorded from the Canadian Arctic Archi- 

 pelago, but reappears at Shingle Point, near the mouth of the 

 Mackenzie River (Macoun and Holm, 1921). There are no 

 records of its occurrence on the northern coast of Alaska. It is 

 common on the southern and western coasts of Alaska, on the 

 Aleutian Islands, the coasts of eastern Siberia, and Kamchatka, 

 and ranges southward to Korea and Japan. There are no records 

 of it from the arctic coast of Siberia. Like Elymus, it grows on 

 the shores of large lakes in Russia and North America. Its most 

 striking difference in distribution from Elymus and Honckenya 

 is its practical absence from the arctic coasts of America and Asia. 

 It is found on the coast of southern Chile from S Lat. 41° to S 

 Lat. 47° (Reiche, 1896, 1907; Macloskie, 1903-06). 



Fernald (1932) has noted the unfortunate necessity of aban- 

 doning the familiar name Lathyrus maritimus in favor of L. 

 japonicus. In the same paper he distinguishes four varieties and 

 remarks as follows with regard to the history of the species 

 (p. 187) : 



Phylogenetically Lathyrus japonicus, var. aleuticus, occurring as a 

 tolerably uniform plant around the arctic and subarctic areas, would 

 seem to be the primitive or ancestral type, which, pushing south- 

 ward into more temperate conditions, has become modified into 

 the glabrous but thin-leaved L. japonicus var. typicus and into the 

 two coarser and heavier-leaved extremes of temperate regions, vars. 

 glaber and pellitus. 



Lathyrus littoralis (Nutt.) Endl. (fig. 6d) is a minor species of 

 the foredunes, not equivalent to L. japonicus in ecologic role. It 

 ranges from Vancouver Island (Ucleulet) southward to Mon- 

 terey Bay, California. 



