FLOWERING PLANTS OF NANTUCKET 427 
a scarce weed ora casual estray from cultivation. Included among 
the introduced plants are also some sixty North American species, 
all of which are quite certainly not of the island’s indigenous 
flora. 
The families represented by all these plants number sixty- 
three, eleven being foreign to the indigenous Nantucket flora. As 
many as nineteen have only a single member and the same number 
not more than two or three. The most numerous family is the 
Gramineae with fifty or more members, a number subject to con- 
siderable increase by taking account of all named varieties. 
Among the grasses, as in other groups, the absence will be re- 
marked of some species that might well be looked for. As an 
instance, so common a port and streetside immigrant as Eleusine 
indica has not yet made its way to Nantucket where, it might be 
thought, the shipping activities of earlier days might long ago 
have brought it in. 
The family most noteworthy in respect of greater representa- 
tion by alien than by native members is the Cruciferae with thirty- 
four introduced species and only four that are native. A less 
marked preponderance of immigrant species is found in the 
Caryophyllaceae and Fabaceae, these families having respectively 
ninteeen and twenty-five alien members against eight and eighteen, 
in corresponding order, that are indigenous. The number of 
introduced species belonging to other well-represented families 
are as follows: Compositae, 28; Labiatae, 18; Cichoriaceae, IT; 
Scrophulariaceae, 10; Salicaceae, 10; Solanaceae, 9; Polygonaceae, 
9; Chenopodiaceae, 8, and Rosaceae, Ammiaceae and Borragi- 
naceae, 7 each. The largest of the native plant families, the 
Cyperaceae, numbering eighty-seven species, has only two species 
that are introduced, both Carices, and the third largest native 
family, the Compositae, to which so many of our immigrant weeds 
belong, numbers but thirty-two introduced species against seventy- 
two that are indigenous. The Rosaceae and Polygonaceae also 
preponderate as native families, possessing respectively twenty- 
nine and twenty indigenous members and only seven and nine that 
have come by immigration. Of important native families the 
Juncaceae and Orchidaceae are, as would be expected, totally un- 
represented in the introduced flora, and there is only a single in- 
