FERNALD. — ELEOCHARIS OVATA. 487 



and they are both annuals with small tufts of merely fibrous roots. Both 

 Eleocharis palustris and E. oUvacea, on the other hand, are well known, 

 and are always described as perennials with definite root-stocks. Another 

 Massachusetts specimen, collected by C. E. Perkins at AVinchester, soon 

 after Mr. Hitchings found the puzzling Dedham plant, has likewise been 

 referred to both E. obtusa and E. oHvacea, and doubtfully to E. diandra. 

 In attempting, then, to place satisfactorily this anomalous plant, recent 

 botanists have associated it at different times with no less than five 

 species. 



The plant is probably of general, though perhaps not of abundant, 

 distribution throughout eastern Massachusetts. In the middle of October, 

 1897, a small plant, which may well be a depauperate form of the Ded- 

 ham plant, was collected by E. F. Williams and J. M. Greenman at 

 Massapoag Pond in Sharon. P^xceptional individuals among these 

 autumnal specimens have short capillary stolons, but, except for this 

 unusual development, they can hardly be distinguished from the smallest 

 specimens collected by Mr, Hitchings. A little later, specimens identical 

 with the larger Dedham plant were collected by Mr. Williams in the bog 

 south of Annursnack Hill in Concord. 



In northern Maine, on the upper waters of the St. John and Penobscot 

 Rivers, where Eleocharis palustris and E. intermedia are common species, 

 this Dedham plant is also abundant. There it has been carefully watched 

 in the field, where it forms dense tufts of generally slender and decidedly 

 flexuous culms, which are often quite prostrate upon the ground, giving 

 the plant a superficial resemblance to E. intermedia. From the gener- 

 ally common E. obtusa, whose place this slender flexuous plant (Figs. 15 

 to 22) seems to take in northern Maine, it is otherwise superficially distin- 

 guished by its dark chestnut or purple ovate or ovate-lanceolate acutish 

 scales, which are looser in the heads and more spreading than the paler 

 brown ascending closely appressed obovate obovate-oblong or suborbicu- 

 lar blunt scales of E. obtusa. The color of the scales, though fairly 

 constant, is not, however, so distinctive a character of the Dedham 

 and northern Maine plant as the size and shape of the tubercle. The 

 tubercle of this dark-scaled plant is deltoid-conical, slightly or not at all 

 constricted at the base, suggesting in outline a half-closed parasol with 

 incurved edge ; it is about three fifths as wide as the obovate or inverted- 

 pyriform achene which it caps, and usually about three sevenths as high 

 as the body of the achene. The tubercle of E. obtusa, on tlie other hand, 

 as already described, is usually as broad as the cuneate-obovate achene, and 

 it is depressed and generally one third as high as the body of the achene. 



