304 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE Vol. XXVI, 1919 



But in 1899 Greene described R. pratincola and since then there 

 has been more or less confusion. Greene's description and com- 

 ments are as follows : "R. pratincola. Almost herbaceous and 

 never more than suffrutescent, 1-2 ft. high, usually flowering ter- 

 minally and corymbosely from upright shoots of the season ; bark of 

 the stem glaucescent, the prickles dark purplish, all slender and 

 weak, but some larger and less slender than others, all straight, 

 spreading or slightly deflexed ; leaves very ample for the plant, 

 leaflets 7-11, obovate and oblong-obovate, sharply serrate, some- 

 what cuspidately acute, pubescent on both surfaces when young, 

 the upper surface glabrate in age ; stipules very narrow and entire, 

 soft-pubescent, but neither glandular nor prickly, the rhachis often 

 setose-prickly ; receptacle smooth and glabrous, the sepals very 

 wooly within and also marginally, the tips villous on both sides, 

 the back of the basal part glandular-hispid ; achenes nearly smooth, 

 but more or less hirsute on certain of the angles and about the 

 base or summit. 



"I thus designate unhesitatingly as a new species one of the 

 commonest of North American roses, and one of the most abun.- 

 dantly habitating a very extensive range in U. S. and Canada ; a 

 denizen of the prairie regions of the west and northwest, from 

 Illinois and Missouri to the Dakbtas and Manitoba. It has passed 

 for R. Arkansana and to that extent that probably almost all the so- 

 called R. Arkansana of the herbaria of the country is of this species. 

 It is found in eastern Kansas and Nebraska, but does not occur in 

 Colorado or anywhere very near its borders in so far as we can 

 ascertain. It is the peculiar rose of the rich grassy prairies of 

 the upper Mississippi valley; and though passing for R. Arkansana 

 has been distributed by Sandberg from Minnesota as R. humilis. It 

 is of course, a part of R. blanda of the earlier American authors and 

 of local botanists residing in prairie regions. 



"Probably no botanist, knowing as I know both the Illinois and 

 Wisconsin prairies and the valley of the Arkansas in Colorado, 

 could be brought to entertain the notion that any species of rose 

 could be common to the two. The latter is an arid and subsaline 

 half -desert country, a region of cactaceous and salicorniaceous 

 plants, probably about as different from the region of R. pratincola 

 as Arabia is from England; a consideration which does not seem 

 to have entered the minds of our American rhodologists — if we 

 have any — much less those of the European students of the genus. 



"R. Arkansana has not been, I think, collected a second time; and 

 as I spent many a week in arduous collecting about Canon City, in 



