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BICKNELL: FERNS AND FLOWERING PLANTS OF NANTUCKET 417 
I have elsewhere reported* that the common heather, so well 
established on Nantucket at the locality where it was first intro- 
duced, is not the typical glabrate form of the species but is the 
pubescent form, var. pubescens Koch. As I have observed it, 
this is a neater appearing and more attractive plant than the 
glabrous type and by contrast of appearance a very different 
one. The heather found on Marthas Vineyard is, on the contrary, 
the typical glabrate plant. It is an interesting fact that this form 
occurs on Nantucket also, but at a locality remote from that 
where the pubescent form is found. The single cluster already 
referred to as growing not very far from the Kimball farm was of | 
the glabrate form, and an old specimen in the Columbia University 
herbarium bearing no other record than “‘ Nantucket”’ is the same. 
Another old specimen in this herbarium, presumably of the same 
period, is of the pubescent form. It was collected by Mrs. Pearson 
twenty-seven years ago, in 1886, and was from the same locality 
where the pubescent plant is found today. The occurrence of 
both forms on Nantucket at the period of its early discovery 
there would appear to indicate that the island had received this 
addition to its flora not alone from its chance introduction with 
trees imported from Europe but also through some other channel 
which remains quite unknown. 
Erica TETRALIX L. 
It is related of the cross-leaved heath by Mrs. Owen (loc. cit.) 
that it, also, was introduced with the imported pines that brought 
the Calluna and was first observed on Nantucket in 1884 by Miss 
Susan Coffin. Mr. Willis, in his note already cited, has recorded 
that, in 1886, Mr. Henry Coffin made a thorough search of the 
tract where this heath had been found the same year by Mrs. 
Pearson and discovered twenty patches of the Erica, which ‘‘was 
as abundant among the firs [pines] brought from Illinois as among 
the larches from England.” The cross-leaved heath appears to 
have been found on Nantucket nowhere else than at this locality. 
In 1911 it was fairly common there, well scattered among the 
clusters of Calluna and evidently perfectly naturalized. The 
following season, like the Calluna, much of it had been winter- 
killed and no flowers were to be found as late as July 12. In 1909 
* Rhodora, 15: 189-192. N 1913. 
