382 ANNUAL KEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 39 



destroyed, as we were taught, by Pleistocene ice. To the student of 

 biogeography it is a most important plant. Luckily, no factories, 

 vomiting poison into the river, have yet been built upriver from it. 

 Let them once start to pollute the waters and then develop a freshet 

 to overflow the banks; immediately the last plant of Pedicularis 

 Furbishiae will die and this living witness to the past wide dispersal 

 of its group will be gone. 



Another danger to plants of river gravels is the mechanical one of 

 log driving. In 1905, on one of the Gaspe rivers, my companion and 

 I found, among other extraordinary plants, a half-shrubby straw- 

 berry. Frag aria multicipita (pi. 3), with many erect long-lived fruit- 

 ing branches but no slender runners, such as a conventional straw- 

 berry plant should have. It is not closely related to any known 

 species. Near it was a single small colony of an equally remarkable 

 willow, Salix obtusata^ a shrub which the great monographer of the 

 willows. Dr. Camillo Schneider, can relate to no living species. 

 Twenty years later, taking a party of botanists to see these two 

 unique plants, we found that the heavy teaming of a logging crew 

 and the use of the beach as a lumber camp had quite extinguished 

 them. None but the botanist mourns the loss of these species ; their 

 burial ground is now covered with aggressive weeds of European 

 origin brought there by the lumber crew. 



Another notable plant, partly destroyed by the activity of man, 

 aided perhaps by nature, is the handsome mallow, Phymosia (or 

 Sphaeralcea) remota (pi. 4, fig. 1), related only to plants a thousand 

 miles or more away. Originally known only from a gravelly island 

 in the Kankakee in Illinois, the species suffered from its distinguished 

 beauty and its shifting habitat and there eventually became nearly 

 extinct. In 1927 a second station for it was found more than 450 

 miles to the southeast, in western Virginia, a region originally rich 

 in these highly localized species. In the Virginia habitat "the in- 

 dividual specimens grow vigorously and attain a height of 6 feet or 

 more. * * * Although there is an abundant supply of seeds each 

 year, reproduction seems to be at a low ebb for there is apparently 

 no spread of the plants and the number during the years from 1927 

 to 1931 has remained fairly constant, the total number at the present 

 time being not more than 50." To be sure, brought into the garden 

 and given artificial aid in germinating, the plant succeeds. But in its 

 natural habitat, which alone interests the student of historical phyto- 

 geography, it is constantly in danger of a raid by some overzealous 

 and commercially minded seeker for rare plants for the garden. 



Among the most remarkable descendants of the ancient flora which 

 once girdled the whole northern hemisphere, is the beautiful yellow- 

 flowered shrub, Kerria japonica, brought from eastern Asia to our 



