THE GENUS VIOLA IN MINNESOTA. 127 
which applies not ill to the Atlantic-slope plant. The 
sepals of the northwestern, or var. inornata are notably 
ciliolate; and there are other points of divergence. Its dis- 
tribution is general throughout southern and western 
Minnesota, as the some eighteen sheets in the State Her- 
barium attest. On several of these sheets the specimens are 
mounted together with the exceedingly different V. pedati- 
fida; which would indicate that the two, in Minnesota, 
sometimes are associated, in the field; but I do not recall 
ever having seen any other violet whatsoever, growing in 
company with V. pedata inornata, in Wisconsin or Michigan. 
There occurs in Minnesota and Wisconsin what I can but 
regard as a merely abnormal condition of the plant, in 
which all except the very earliest of the leaves are digitately 
lobed instead of being pedately divided. Such a specimen 
is figured at plate XIV. It exactly corresponds, in so 
far as I can judge, to that condition of the southern plant 
which Pursh in his day took for a distinct species and 
named V. digitata. The drawing was made from a plant 
taken by myself in July, 1898, in Wisconsin. The tuft bear- 
ing these leaves was one which had evidently suffered in- 
jury from fire during the preceding autumn or early spring. 
The very center of the rootstocks had been burned so deeply 
as to have prevented any flowering of the plants that year; 
and these digitate leaves had sprung up from the undestroyed 
nodes. In the Minnesota collection there are two speci- 
mens, collected by W. A. Wheeler, in Houston Co., 16 June, 
1899, which quite agree with mine in this digitate character 
of the leaves. That the history of their development was a 
Tepetition of that of my Wisconsin plants I dare not pre- 
sume to say; but I can not regard any of these deviations 
from the norm of V. pedata as the equivalent of V. indivisa 
1n relation to V. pedatifida. 
