103 
at St. Louis, Missouri), and many others. The presence of so 
many of the coastal plants in the barrens of Middle Tennessce, 
and the ancient character of the underlying rock in comparison 
with the recent sediments which compose the coastal plain, seem 
to indicate that this upland area has been a point of origin of 
plants of the coastal plain. Some of these coastal plants, such as 
Eleocharis microcarpa, occur here and there in siliceous areas 
north to central Indiana, and other species extend to the dunes of 
Lake Michigan. These siliceous areas perhaps depict the rem- 
nants of larger areas which were eroded, but even in the present 
state they might well represent the transition points in the 
migration of a flora from the coastal plain to that of the Great 
Lake dunes through the uplands of Alabama, Tennessee, and 
IXentucky. 
The month of August I spent at Peacham, Vermont, which is 
only thirty miles from the Canadian border. Material was 
collected for the herbarium. This area has long been known as 
one of our northernmost outposts of Rhododendron maximum, 
which has its greatest abundance in the Alleghenies. 
In January, 1941, with the financial assistance of the John 
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, I set sail for Ecuador. 
My trip was originally scheduled for December, but due to un- 
avoidable circumstances, I could not leave until the end of 
January. This exploration trip, as explained in the last Annual 
Report, was carried out for the purpose of tying in the relationship 
of the vegetation of the Galapagos Islands and the coast of 
Ecuador and Peru. The Galapagos have figured very promi- 
nently in discussions of the species problem, yet little or no 
attention has been paid to the desert areas of the continent from 
which a large percentage of the Galapagos plants have un- 
doubtedly been derived. I found the climate and the general 
aspect of the vegetation to be very similar on the coast of Ecuador 
and Peru to that of the Galapagos Islands, and I also found an 
additional number of species which were supposed to be confined 
to the Galapagos group. Most of these are desert plants which 
