The American Midland Naturalist 



PUBLISHED BI-MONTHLY BY THE UNIVERSITY 

 OF NOTRE DAME, NOTRE DAME. INDIANA. 



VOL. III. AUGUST, 1914. NO. II. 



FIELD-NOTES OF WESTERN BOTANY.— I. 



By Edw^^rd L. Greene. 



During my now almost twenty years of residence eastward, 

 in the valley of the Potomac River, very often, in the course 

 of the spring season, I have taken respite from arduous work in 

 library, herbarium, and at the writing table, for a few weeks, and 

 delighted and refreshed myself by rambles in several parts of 

 the Middle West, and sometimes on ground where more than 

 fifty years since the keen pleasure of arduous and careful botanizing 

 began to be enjoyed. 



The field itself, some few small parts of which have furnished 

 the substance of these Notes, is of ver}^ great extent, surpassing 

 the combined area of the Eastern and Middle States, several 

 times told; and no skilled botanist could spend three days of 

 field work in any small section of it without noting interesting 

 facts in plenty which are told in none of those manuals, each of 

 which idly, and even audaciously, pretends to contain all that 

 is worth knowing about the botany of that vast stretch of territory, 

 the Prairie vStates. 



J^fyosttnts miniimis, Linn. 



This plant, though written of in the books as if occuring 

 almost anywhere between Ontario, Florida, and from Virginia 

 westward to the Mississippi and even far beyond it, is in reality 

 very seldom met with anywhere; so seldom that I dare venture 

 the guess that more than one in ten of the botanists of our land 

 has ever seen it alive. I know no record of its having been met 

 with in all New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsyl- 

 vania, and the single station for it in Ontario seems very isolated. 

 During some forty seasons of much botanizing in regions lying 



