314 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 



fallow and weedy field, I at once began searching for it in all 

 manner of wild lands, but with no success. 



Circumstances like these seem to indicate that Myosurus 

 minimus is in America as adventive, and even here and there 

 naturalized, from Europe. But there are other facts relating to 

 its distribution here that may not seem so easily reconcilable to 

 that view. One such fact is that of its much more frequent 

 occurrence and apparentl}' up and down the whole length of the 

 country in the States that lies on the western banks of the Missis- 

 sippi River. It is credited to the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, 

 and in western Missouri Mr. B. F. Bush has found it in many 

 places. It is mentioned as being "locally common" there. The 

 expression is that of Mackenzie and Bush, in the Flora of Jackson 

 County, and will be understood as saying that in each of its 

 scattered localities there is plenty of it. But Mr. Bush also obtains 

 it, or what he calls by that name, in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and 

 even Texas. It has also been obtained, but very scantily, on the 

 Rocky Moutnain plains, in Colorado, and in Wyoming. As regards 

 Colorado, however, we are to-day wholly without evidence that 

 the species ever was naturally other than foreign to that flora. 

 According to Mr. P.ydberg it was never fotmd there but once, 

 and that long, ago, at Denver, by Miss Eastwood. There might 

 have been another citation of it for that same locality if the 

 author of the Colorado Flora had consulted my own rich her- 

 barium of Colorado plants; for I now find therein a good specimen 

 of Myosurus minimus collected by myself at Denver in 1870. 

 Even the label was written by me forty years since, and it reads 

 Denver, whereby I am assured that I must have found the plant 

 within the limits of the straggling town of perhaps 7000 people, 

 which was all there was of it at that date, and before the advent 

 of the first railway, and while there was yet no State of Colorado, 

 but only the Territory of that name. Miss Eastwood's sojourn in 

 Denver must have been some ten years or more subsequent to 

 mine, and we have proof of the plants' survival there in her day, 

 but since then no more seems to have been heard of it as in Colo- 

 rado at all; and what in 1870, and even in 1880, were the wild 

 untilled plains and sand hills where wild plants grew, and where 

 myosurus chanced to be, is now a part of the very heart of the 

 great city, and the little adventive may have become extinct. 



I reasonably account for its early occurrence, and at that 



