BICKNELL: VIOLA OBLIQUA HILL AND OTHER VIOLETS 265 
where Viola obliqua grows. In these near meadows or by brooks 
that traverse the same woodlands ‘ Viola cucullata”’ raises its 
long-stemmed flowers of twofold blue. In many ways the smooth 
“ papilionacea’’ is strikingly intermediate between these two 
plants. Doctor Brainerd has opened our eyes to violet hybrids. 
Have we not found one here? I recall all these violets as 
they grew in profusion about my former home on the Hudson 
and seem to see, I did not see it then, our woodland and our 
meadow violet meeting in such places as I have described and 
crossing over into each other—how else than through free hybridi- 
zation? And the perplexing intermediate examples that I had 
then tried to sort into species seem, as the specimens are turned 
to now, to lend strong confirmation to such an hypothesis. If, 
then, we have indeed here come upon the truth, our ‘‘ papilionacea”’ 
is seen to be not all that we have been asked to believe. Yet 
by this very reduction it takes a clearer outline as a plant marked 
by a characteristic hairiness on the convex side of the petiole, 
often localized just below the blade, but often, also, thinly diffused 
on the lower surface of the lamina, precisely as Mr. Holm’s 
drawing so faithfully portrays. The upper face of the blade is 
by no means always glabrous, but what pubescence may later 
appear there is not often very obvious. By this at first strictly 
dorsal pubescence it is a marked plant, for it should be noted of 
the glabrous ‘‘ papilionacea ’—whether the hybrid, if so it proves 
to be, or the enhanced Viola obliqua—that the slight pubescence 
it may sometimes show has its site on the upper surface of the 
blade just where we find evidences of it in the nearly glabrous 
Viola cucullata. It is a marked plant also, in its group, by deeply 
cordate and crenate-dentate leaves which in age so open out 
their cordation as to become subtruncate at the base, and it is 
an especially noteworthy violet by reason of a ready tendency to 
semi-domestication. 
It will be well here to turn to yet another one of our violets, 
the pubescent Viola sororia Willd. In woodlands wherein this 
species and Viola obliqua are in free growth together they may 
be found, it is no uncommon thing, blending the one into the 
other in perfect confluence. Among these plants of mixed strain 
we recognize, now Viola obliqua, changed only by the beginnings of 
