122 



lecting then, I took a few plants, and managed to make recog- 

 nizable herbarium specimens of them. Specimens sent later to 

 some of the leading American herbaria were pronounced in- 

 distinguishable from B. sphaerocarpa, except for the simple 

 leaves (which were not universal). 



But even that species had not been credited to Louisiana 

 before, in Small's Flora of the Southeastern United States 

 (1903), R. S. Cocks's notes on the prairies,^ or his Leguminosae 

 of Louisiana.® So it seemed very desirable to find out something 

 about its flowers, to verify the identification; and an op- 

 portunity for that came in April, 1936, when I spent a week in 

 southern Louisiana. On the morning of the 7th I went by bus 

 from Lafayette to Midland, intending to walk back through the 

 prairies of Acadia Parish to Rayne, 15 miles, passing the 

 locality where I had collected in 1934. But I found so many 

 interesting plants that I used up all the available time by the 

 time I got to Crowley, about half way. 



The prairies in that latitude have now been almost com- 

 pletely given over to rice, sugar-cane and other crops, and there 

 is hardly any natural prairie vegetation left except along the 

 railroad right-of-way (as was said to be the case in Illinois a 

 quarter of a century ago) ; and that of course is now rather 

 weedy in spots. But I hit exactly the right time to find the 

 Baptisias in bloom, though cloudy and windy weather all day 

 interfered a little with collecting and made photographing 

 difficult. 



The Baptisia sphaerocarpa (?) was abundant and conspicu- 

 ous, with dozens of golden yellow flowers on each mature plant, 

 and it is astonishing that it could have been overlooked by all 

 the botanists who had passed that way on the railroad and 

 highway, especially in earlier years when there was much more 

 undisturbed prairie vegetation than there is now. 



On looking at thousands of plants of it that day I saw that 

 the unifoliate and trifoliate leaves often occurred on the same 

 plant, but the former were more characteristic of the upper 



5 The flora of the Gulf Biologic Station. Bull. 7, Gulf. Biol. Sta. (at 

 Cameron, La.), 42 pp. 1907. More than six pages are devoted to the flora of 

 the prairies west of Lafayette, but no Baptisia is mentioned. 



* Leguminosae of Louisiana. Nat. Hist. Surv. Bull. 1, La. State Mus. 

 (New Orleans), vi-f 26 pp., 37 unnumbered plates on 19 unnumbered leaves. 

 Sept. 1910. Nine species of Baptisia are listed, one of them new. 



