“APR 10. 1917 
THE OTTAWA NATURALIST. 
"Vor. XIX. OTTAWA, DECEMBER, 100s. No. 9 
ON SO-CALLED SILENE MENZIESII. 
By EDWARD L. GREENE. 
The original specimens of what Sir William Hooker in his 
Flora Boreali-Americana, published as a rather dubious mem- 
ber of the genus Sz/ene, under the name SS. MWenzteszz, were from 
the shores of Puget Sound. Within the hundred years and more 
that have passed since Menzies gathered this, plants of just this 
type have been collected from almost every part of the western 
half of North America, and-all the way from the humid seaboard 
woods and hills to the banks of little streams coursing down the 
slopes of desert mountains in the remote and arid interior of the 
continent; from the level of the sea to near the alpine summits of 
the Rocky Mountains and a thousand miles inland. No type of 
higher plant life remains specifically one and the same throughout 
so vast arange, and so great a diversity of geological and climatic 
_conditions; and, quite as we should expect, these inland plants from 
one region and another, differ both from the original type, and from 
one another so widely and variedly that no unbiased mind would 
ever regard them as being all one Sv/ene Menzies1z. A low almost 
matted one from Idaho, at a point 8,000 feet above the sea, looks 
_ like Chickweed; another from 11,000 feet in Colorado, looxs more 
like Avenaria laterifiora, while a third away up in Assiniboia 
resembles one of the most upright and delicate of Stellarias. A 
prolonged and careful study of the material of this kind now ex- 
tant in the larger herbaria has made the distinguishing of eighteen 
species of this aggregate a necessity; and the characters of them 
have lately been given in Volume One of my Leaflets. The group 
is out of all harmony with Sz/ene, as even Hooker felt, when he 
had but the one species in hand. It is every way more like either 
