ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF SOME WESTERN PLANTS. 183 
scented weed of spring and early summer. In wild wood- 
land or thicket, or in open uncultivated plain no one ever 
encounters it; and if anywhere to the northward or north- 
eastward of California it should be found to behave differ- 
ently, then might we conclude that in California it is, what it 
always seems to be, an immigrant; and that it came there 
from the north, since the settlement of Oregon and Califor- 
nia by our race of people. That it is indigenous to the coast 
region of the northwest, no one ever doubted; and it does 
not readily migrate eastward. It is not one of those plants 
that follow the railways to regions east of the Sierra 
Nevada and the Cascades. If it has been found in Utah, it 
no doubt made its way thither from the north. Butit has a 
very near relative, M. occidentalis, which has not yet been 
found outside of central California, This is a tall and coarse 
weed chiefly of the middle Californian grain fields. It pre- 
fers a rich adobe soil, but has been also observed in sandy 
ground. Belonging as it does to a genus whose species are 
mostly European, and being a grain-field weed, when I first 
discovered this plant and remarked its specific characters as 
distinct from M. discoidea, I went at once to books of Old 
World botany in expectation of proving it a foreigner—a 
search which ended in its establishment as a native of Cali- 
fornia and a new species. As this plant is found in abund- 
ance nowhere but in the rich fields of the interior valleys of 
Sacramento and San Joaquin, the occurrence of scattered 
individuals about Berkeley and San Francisco, and elsewhere 
along the seaboard, may possibly bespeak a tendency on the 
part of this plant to become domesticated, after the fashion 
of its congener. 
Very characteristic of the Californian flora in general are 
those composites of the genus Madia and its allies, com- 
monly called tarweeds. In the State Survey Botany a con- 
siderable aggregate of most distinct species was passed off 
as Madia sativa. The herb to which this name was first 
given is South American, a native of Chile. Probably the 
very common roadside tarweed of the Bay region of Califor- 
