VASCULAR PLANTS OF NORTH DAKOTA 157 
his own places for field research, has had some striking and even 
astonishing results. My good fortune has always guided me to 
find places of exceptional value to the botanist. During my 
wanderings I have often happened on plants, either immature 
or overripe, the proper time for their collection being so far in 
the past or in the future, that their places in the system could 
not be properly set down. They are scattered widely apart in 
the state, and each of them needs its individual attention on a 
certain date of the season, and on a certain place. I am loth 
to leave them alone, and I would not do so, were it not for more 
or less apparent reasons, hinted at in, these pages or readable 
between the lines. The summers yet allotted to me on this planet 
of ours would perhaps give me enough of time for finishing this 
work, and I would spend them on nothing in the world more 
agreeable and more preferable to myself. 
Dr. Brenckle necessarily paying almost his entire attention 
to fungi, I myself being on the verge of actual or partial or fancied 
retirement from botanical field work, and Prof.. Stevens likely 
alone upholding this branch of study within the state, what are 
the present prospects for the discovery of those remaining 700 
vascular plants? If it becomes possible for Prof Stevens to 
avoid the lurking rocks of politics and continue the work incess- 
antly for a life time, he will certainly discover a considerable part 
of them. 
Thus, being temperamentally not oversanguinely hopeful, I 
believe that the most prudent way is to distrust the uncertain 
future and publish the results attained so far. 
My list contains mainly names of plants collected by myself, 
and where other botanists have contributed, they have been 
invariably credited for it. About 150 species, contained in the 
Agricultural College lists, have been omitted for the sole reason, 
that I have had no occasion to look at them. I do by no means 
charge that they have been wrongly identified. 
In the naming of plants which I have considered new I had 
precious help from my own general herbarium, which offered 
means of comparison with related species. In a minority of cases 
the descriptions furnished in manuals and periodicals proffered 
reasons for segregation sufficient and convincing at least to myself, 
In a number of instances it has been my enviable luck that Dr. 
Edw. L. Greene placed his immense experience and invaluable 
