PAPERS ON BOTANY 



109 



published in St. Louis, there is no published evidence that 

 he connects his horcalis oaks with either of the forms into 

 which Vasey had attempted to divide Q. coccinea as he 

 understood it. Yet as early as 1870 this attempt had been 

 made,* and one of the forms, his var. microcarpa, is un- 

 mistakably figured. It may be that Vasey meant to refer 

 this form to Q. coccinea microcarpa Torrey, of the South- 

 west — now known as Q. texana, from which it is distinct 

 though even the latter species is so like in foliage to 

 Q. palustris as to have passed for it. Most of the speci- 

 mens collected by Dr. Vasey are without definite indica- 

 tion of locality ; but he is known to have collected exten- 

 sively about Ringwood, in one of the northernmost coun- 

 ties of Illinois, and one such specimen is labeled as from 

 Ringwood. 



Also before Englemann's short publication on these 

 ambiguous oaks of the lake region, one of the most acute 

 local botanists who has yet appeared in the United States, 

 M. S, Bebb, had puzzled over them as they occur in an- 

 other of the northern counties of Illinois, where, about 

 Fountaindale, he studied them in numerous individual 

 trees of which he made excellent specimens, some of which 

 were communicated to correspondents and the remainder 

 of which have come to rest as a part of his personal herba- 

 rium, now housed in the Field Museum of Chicago. Un- 

 fortunately the conservatism for which Bebb was noted 

 kept him from recording even on the labels his determina- 

 tion of most of these specimens, though some few are 

 labeled as Querciis rubra or as Q. coccinea. 



In 1898 Rev. E. J. Hall, to whom the flora of the neigh- 

 borhood of Chicago was better known than it has ever been 

 to another, described* and figured what he took for a local 

 hybrid of Querciis coccinea and Q. palustris: and the fol- 

 lowing year, without indicating its relation, if any, to this 

 hybrid, he characterizedf a common oak of that region 

 under the specific name elUpsoidalis, given because of the 

 elongated acorns produced by trees that he took to be 

 typical of it. In aspect, bark, and foliage this species was 

 made to compare more or less closely with Querciis palus- 



♦American Entomol. & Bot. 1 :344-5. f, 213. 



♦Botanical Gazette, 16 :5o. pi, 5-6, — Specimens of this, which I take for what 

 is here called Q. elUpsoidalis intermedia, occur from Thornton, Illinois, as Hill, 

 6i/9ti, 2i)(i/91. 



tBotanical Gazette. 27 : 204. pi. 2-3, 



