143 



may be just as acceptable to plants as lime has been thought to 

 be; and on the river bluffs near by, and in ravines between 

 them, are many plants which are commonly regarded as lime- 

 loving. 2 I have a distinct recollection of seeing somewhere along 

 that route, probably on a shaly bluff, a plant that I took to be 

 Erigenia. But I did not record it in my field notes, perhaps be- 

 cause I saw only one specimen and wanted to see more before 

 making a record of it. And I could not take time to search for 

 more, for I had 16 miles to walk that afternoon, and reached 

 Holt less than ten minutes before the departure of the last car 

 for Tuscaloosa. 



On subsequent trips to the same general region I used to 

 wonder why I could never find the plant again; and I did not 

 list it in my account of the "botanical bonanza" in Tuscaloosa 

 County, in 1922 (just cited). But nearly all my later trips were 

 made between April and October, and I could easily have 

 passed by the Erigenia in late spring or summer without seeing 

 it. 



However, conditions were more propitious on March 4, 1932, 

 when I went with Dr. B. P. Kaufmann of the University of Ala- 

 bama and a small party of his botany students to one of the 

 shaly bluffs on the Warrior River about ten miles above Tusca- 

 loosa or five miles above Holt, which is the best locality for 

 Croton alabamensis and several other rarities listed in the paper 

 just mentioned. In rich shady woods on the south side of the 

 deep ravine that terminates that bluff on the north, on soil of 

 weathered shale mixed with humus, I found several specimens 

 of the Erigenia in bloom, thus concluding a quest that had 

 extended intermittently over 26 years. (My 1906 locality, 

 though not remembered exactly now, was some distance back 

 from the river, in the valley of a creek that comes in a few miles 

 above the Croton bluff.) 



The find was of course made known to other members of the 

 party, and Dr. Kaufmann, looking at the plants more closely 

 than I usually do, soon called my attention to the fact that 

 many of the flowers had three carpels, a character apparently 

 unrecorded in the Umbelliferae. That is not necessarily an ab- 

 normality, but merely a variation that has been overlooked; 

 and it might possibly be found to characterize the same species 



2 See Jour. Elisha Mitchell Sci. Soc. 37: 153-160. 1922. 



