Y 
The American Midland Naturalist 
PUBLISHED BI-MONTHLY BY THE UNIVERSITY 
OF NOTRE DAME, NOTRE DAME, INDIANA. 
VOL. Il. JUNE, 1911. NO. 4.* 
ANTENNARIA IN THE MIDDLE WEST. 
By Epwarp L. GREENE. 
The prairie region of the Middle West I roughly estimate 
to be about three times the area of New York, Pennsylvania, New 
Jersey and the six New England States combined. Concerning 
the antennarias of that eastern region the botanists of all the 
generations preceding ours knew so little that we may call it 
nothing at all and not be far wrong. Only recently have eastern 
botanists begun really to look at the plants, and to find that 
they have there a dozen easily definable species where the fore- 
fathers had but one. This being true in the little field of the Base, 
much more probably shall we find even now the knowledge of 
Middle Western antennarias to be scanty, seeing that this field 
is of such vast extent, and the critical students of systematic 
botany resident there are so very few. 
Such knowledge of the botany of the prairies as a botanically 
minded school boy may have, I had acquired about a half-century 
ago, and in recent years I have made several rather extended 
vacation tours through various parts of the Middle West, always 
studying the antennarias on the ground, and making specimens. 
Several collectors in various prairie states have gathered them, 
and there are some scores of sheets in the herbarium of the Na- 
tional Museum which have been so acquired, and altogether 
it seems quite time that some kind of a census should be made 
of all that we seem to have been able to gather and to distinguish 
in the middle-western membership of the genus. Such a census 
ean hardly fail to stimulate to more active investigation. 
I entertain no hope of being able confidently to refer to one 
or another of the dozen or fifteen clear species of the Middle West 
all the several scores of herbarium sheets existing in my own 
* June 10, 1911.—Pages 73 to 96. 
