380 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 39 



are the plants familiar to everyone in certain areas, quite unknown 

 in other areas, conservative as to habitat, holding their own and 

 prospering under the conditions they have always known. Follow- 

 ing the social classification adopted, they might be called the upper 

 middle class, too fastidious to be "go-getters" but with enough 

 vitality and reproductive capacity to prosper where conditions are 

 favorable. This conservative but prospering element in the flora 

 consists largely of genera or subgenera which have the interrupted 

 eastern Asiatic-eastern American range. Whenever fossils of these 

 groups — Adiantum^ Chamaecyparis^ Carya (hickory), the hornbeams, 

 the black birches, Celastrms, Tilia, etc. — have been found they indi- 

 cate a general occurrence in Tertiary time (sometimes Cretaceous) 

 over the Northern Hemisphere, often including areas which are now 

 the Arctic. It is significant, therefore, that these plants of consider- 

 able antiquity have largely lost the pioneering capacity of younger 

 types. 



Then come the various groups of local species, plants of wide 

 general range but always w^ith restricted areas, not abundant over 

 large tracts : Isotria afjinh^ the small whorled pogonia, Cypripediurn 

 aristinuTn^ the ram's-head lady's slipper, Trollius Icuxus^ globe flower, 

 Poly gala hrevifolia^ Polemonium Vmi-Bruntice and many more. 

 Isotria aifinis (pi. 1, fig. 2) has altogether about a dozen known 

 eastern stations, scattered from Virginia to Maine. Its northern out- 

 liers are a patch of 35 plants in Oxford County, Maine, one of a few 

 individuals in central New Hampshire, and one of a single individual 

 in northwestern Vermont. These plants are exclusive, undemocratic 

 as to their associates, and show the social isolation and the limited 

 reproduction of the aristocracy. 



My chief concern today, however, is not with the ultrademocratic 

 intruders from Europe or the bourgeois, the upper middle class, or 

 even the lesser aristocrats in our indigenous flora. My plea is for 

 wholehearted protection of that helpless but tremendously interesting 

 group which may be called the fugitive aristrocrats, the completely 

 isolated and usually entirely overlooked small colonies, doing no one 

 any harm but of utmost importance to the student of life and its 

 history through the last 100,000,000 years. Benjamin Franklin was 

 himself a democrat, but Franklinia^ named in his honor, was a fugi- 

 tive aristocrat. Even if we try to overlook the commercial implica- 

 tion of Moses Marshall's last visit to the refuge of Franklinia on the 

 Altamaha, it is perfectly evident that the unrestrained pressure of 

 bourgeois and vagrant species about it and the unintelligent intrusion 

 of aggressive man would soon have wiped it out. Its fate has been 

 that of hundreds (no one can guess how many) of relict species, and a 

 similar fate threatens the whole series of highly localized rarities. 



