312 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 



eastward of the Mississippi, T have met with the plant but twice; 

 first pear Nashville, Tennessee, in 1863, last in the prairie region 

 of south-central Illinois, in 1908. In this last instance I was im- 

 pressed by the copious abundance of the plant and the fact of its 

 occurrence there only as a weed in land long under cultivation. 

 The individuals could have numbered hundreds of thousands, 

 and they were growing amid more scattering and rather small 

 plants of shepherd's purse, more or less chickweed, this dwarfed 

 as it usually is when exposed in the open field to the full glare of 

 sunlight all day, and there were masses here and there of Poa 

 Chapmaniana, also almost everywhere a small annual or biennial 

 Ranuncuhis of the alliance of R. abortivus, yet very distinct from that 

 and even from the western R. micranthus, but for which I have not 

 yet invented a name or written a diagnosis. 



The tract of land where myosurus and '•all these its associates 

 grew so thriftily was a fallow field. Indian corn had been grown 

 there the second season before, then it had lain fallow for a year; 

 and the date of my study there was in the very early part of the 

 month of May; so that this crop of weeds, botanically so very 

 interesting, had held possession of that field, remaining undisturbed 

 there, all through the late summer and the autun)n of the year 

 1907, the whole of 1908, and through almost the whole spring 

 season of 1909. 



I have long entertained a suspicion that this Myosurus 

 minimus of the United States is not native here, and have been 

 ready to believe that it came into our flora in the first place as a 

 chance introduction from Kurope. 



American botanists of the se\'enteenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies — and they were a numerous as well as a goodly com.pan\ 

 knew nothing of any myosurus as occurring here. None of the 

 Bartrams, Marshalls, Collinses, well travelled as most them 

 were, especially southward where it was destined first to be met 

 with, ever came upon it. Other men, and later, like Michaux, 

 Pursh, and Nuttall, who travelled still more widely, and further 

 southward and southwestward, and each with keener eyes, as 

 having every one, in his own mind, the purpose of writing a general 

 Flora of the country, knew nothing of the existence of the genus 

 in America. This was the status of the case as late as the year 

 1S18, or near the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century. 

 At al)out this time Dr. vShort, of Ilopkinsville, Kentucky, sent to 



