3l6 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 



By way of incentive to future observation on this genus as 

 in the United States eastward let us here take note of two im- 

 portant matters, and first, that of the great scarcity of it to the 

 eastward of the Mississippi River. We have already seen that 

 it has long been known to occur here and there in the South, and to 

 the northward of the Ohio River only in southern Illinois. All the 

 rest of Illinois, the whole of Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, 

 Minnesota, and Iowa, show no record of myosurus. Then con- 

 tinuing eastward, Pennsylvania, New York, the whole of New 

 Kngland, and even down to New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and 

 West Virginia form an empire of territory destitute of Myosurus, 

 as far as knowledge goes. Nor has it been found in either of the 

 Carolinas. Its advent into any one of those states, aggregating as 

 they do far the greater part of the Altantic slope within the U. S. 

 is to be watched for in the future. The second matter to be taken 

 under careful observation is wherther, in a given locality, the 

 plant may the more probably have come in from the West or from 

 the South. 



The most isolated of known American stations for Myosurus 

 mimimus is that at Belleville, near the northwestern shore of 

 Lake Ontario in eastern Canada, where it was disco\ered and 

 collected as long ago as 1878, by Mr. John Macoun. It is at a 

 much greater distance from the familiar Southern Midland 

 myosurus territory than Denver is, and is in nothing like direct 

 communication with any part of the Ignited vStates where the 

 species, or the genus is known. It is beyond all doubt in my 

 mind that this East Canadian plant is an importation from some 

 part of British Columbia or Alberta, where the species is known 

 to occur. This interesting station, however, about which I think 

 nothing more has been heard these last thirty-five or forty years, 

 deserves to be revisited and the plants investigated in the light 

 of what has been herein suggested. 



Hepatica acuHloba, DC. 



On a considerable number of fresh plants of this, which 

 some years since Mr. William R. Maxon kindly procured for me 

 from northern New York, and which were coming into flower 

 v/hen they reached me at Washintgon, I observed that nearly 

 all the plants showed almost completely unisexual flowers; some 

 exhibiting many stamens but with barely two or three pistils, 



