88 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
An interesting series of specimens is in U. S$. Herb., taken from 
a “Sandy barren west of Ottawa” by Mr. Charles P. Johnson 
of Freeport, Ill., 10 May, 1899. The specimens fill five herbarium 
sheets and number fourteen, six of which are fertile, and them- 
selves alone considered would pass for A. occidentalis; but the 
eight sterile specimens which from a part of the series are most 
plainly, even glaringly, of two kinds. Of normal male specimens 
there are but two, and six are something else; yet I have no 
doubt that the three phases—male, female and neutral, I shall 
call them—are of one species. During at least ten years past 
I have been aware of the existence of a certain occasional tri- 
morphism. The occasional third form, while showing more 
likeness to the male than to the female, is in aspect intermediate; 
always taller than the male, its involucre longer, yet with scales 
equal in length and their tips distinctly more narrow and elon- 
gated, yet always obtuse, just as those of all male plants are obtuse; 
and the pappus-bristles, while never flattened, are coarser at 
summit and barbellate. I have seen them in Maryland, and in 
the District of Columbia, in perfect maturity shedding their 
abortive achenes, throwing them off to be scattered by the winds 
quite after the manner of the fertile plants. I suspect that if 
I had eyesight to study these occasional third forms in flower 
I should find them to be in some imperfect way bisexual, or her- 
maphrodite as to the individual flower. Nevertheless, with a 
mere hand lens I have been able to see that the pappus these 
plants give to the winds carries no achene, but only an empty 
shell. The fact of this trimorphism of course increases the diff- 
culty which this genus presents to the student. If it should 
happen that the phase which I call neutral should in some places 
present itself along with the female colony to the total exclusion 
of the normal male, it might be taken by the inadvertent for the 
real male, and lead to the propounding of false species. 
Kansas. In the original account of A. occidentalis it was 
noted that it seemed to occur westward to Kansas. Nothing 
more is known of the plants at the time I wrote. The specimen 
I had from Kansas at that time is again before me. It is a fair 
pistillate plant, from “ Woods, Pottawatomie Co.,” by A. S. 
Hitchcock and may well be this species, as far as one sex alone 
can enable one to determine. 
