498 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



II. — SCIRPUS ERIOPHORUM AND SOME RELATED FORMS. 



In July, 1891, while collecting in the Saco valley about Cornish, Maine, 

 I was puzzled by a strange " wool-grass " which there abounded in the 

 low thickets and meadows. Eventually, however, the plant was con- 

 signed, with some other very different forms, to the one place provided 

 for it in the American manuals — Scirpiis Eriophorum, Michx. (^Erio- 

 phorum cyperinum, L.). Again in 189G, my attention was called by Mr. 

 J. C. Parlin to another " wool-grass " in southern IMaine, which in size, 

 color, and fruiting season was very unlike the common species of north- 

 ern New England ; and more recently Messrs. Luman Andrews and 

 Chas. H. Bissell have made careful field-notes about Southington, Con- 

 necticut, on three very dissimilar plants, all of which we must call, if we 

 adhere to the present treatment of the group, Scirpus Eriophorum. 

 Two other forms, one from IMaine and ^Massachusetts, the other from the 

 southeastern and Gulf States, have been associated with this species, 

 which, as now made up, includes six readily distinguished forms. 



Linnaeus described Eriophorum cyperinum^ in 17G2, basing it upon 

 earlier descriptions of Rai,^ Plukenet,^ and Gronovius.^ The Linnean 

 species is a well known plant of eastern America, rather stout, the invo- 

 lucre ferruginous at base, and the small ovoid ferruginous spikelets 

 clustered in glomerules. Uncommon in northern New England, it 

 becomes abundant southward, extending at least to Kentucky. 



In 1803, ]\Iichaux described as Scirpus Eriophorum^ a southern plant 

 (from Virginia to Georgia), and supposing it to be the same as the Lin- 

 nean Eriophorum cyperinum^ he transferred to it the latter species. 

 Michaux's plant, however, though apparently an extreme form of the 

 Linnean species, has the spikelets nearly all distinctly pedicelled, and it 

 is a form of more southern range than the Linnean plant. During the 

 present century these plants have been variously treated, as a single 

 species or as varietally distinct, under Scirpus or Eriophorum, and by 

 Persoon even as part of a separate genus, Tricophorum.^ Ordinarily, 

 Michaux's disposition of the plant as a Scirpus has been accepted, and, 

 although the plant somewhat approaches species of Eriophorum, its 



1 L. Spec. ed. 2, 77. 2 Rai, Suppl. 620. 3 Pluk. Mant. 62, t. 419, f. 3. 



* Gronov. Virg. 11. & Michx. PI. i. 33. 6 Pers. Syn. i. 69. 



