Notes from my herbarium. [1. 
WALTER DEANE. 
NYMPHAEA ODORATA Ait. Sweet-scented water-lily. — 
The sweet-scented water-lily, whose chief attraction to the 
lover of nature is its beautiful flower, grows throughout east- 
ern North America, and its praises have long been sung in 
prose and poetry. To the close observer, however, the 
flower is but one of many points of interest, and I have taken 
the greatest pleasure in collecting the plant for my herbarium. 
Even the best of professional collectors rarely send out in their 
sets full representations of the immersed parts of this plant. 
Indeed, it would not be a paying business if they did, for it 
took me the greater part of an afternoon to prepare satisfac- 
tory specimens for my own herbarium. 
I spent a portion of July, 1886, in the Old Manse, in Con- 
cord, Mass., on the banks of the Concord river, close by the 
old battle-field. In early July, for some miles on either side 
of the stream, the water-lilies form a continuous bed of snowy 
white. I had already collected, elsewhere, the flowers and 
leaves, not realizing at the time what a small portion of the 
plant my herbarium would show. I resolved, now, to rep- 
resent the whole plant, and, so, one pleasant afternoon, I took 
a boat and a rake, and rowed to a spot where the flowers 
were not too thick, and the water was about three feet deep. 
Then, getting the tines of the rake under a thick rootstock, I 
drew upacomplete plant. I madea longitudinal section of the 
rootstock, keeping about a foot of it in length, and leaving 
the large terminal bud in place. The consistency of the stock 
is about that of a green apple. I trimmed the specimen 
carefully, leaving enough to show all the features, a single 
flower, a fully-developed leaf, of which I bent over a small 
portion to show the under surface, and three unopened leaves, 
which had not reached the surface. The vernation of the 
leaves is involute, and before expansion they resemble exactly 
those of Sagittaria latifolia Willd. torm c, of J. G. Smith's 
recent revision. The smallest of these leaves is but an inch 
long, with a stem two inches long. This leaf had barely 
emerged from the mud at the river bottom. I left some of the 
copious roots on the stock, and by coiling the peduncle, petiole 
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