238 



Dr. Shreve to send me a specimen of his plant on his return to 

 Maryland, which he did; and I deposited it in the herbarium of 

 the New York Botanical Garden. It was collected July 13, 1906, 

 on gravel beaches of the Potomac River 1}/^ miles west of Han- 

 cock, Md. Its oldest umbel was only a few days past flowering, 

 so that the fruit characters were not well displayed, but it was 

 evidently not Oxypolis, and I could see nothing to distinguish 

 it from Harperella. It is considerably slenderer than my best 

 specimens of the latter from Georgia, but no more so than those 

 from the mountains of Alabama. 



There the matter rested until February, 1910, when a most 

 interesting sequel developed. In trying to verify the report 

 (current in botanical manuals) of the occurrence of Oxypolis 

 filiformis in Virginia, I traced it back to Torrey & Gray (Fl. N. A. 

 1 : 630. 1840, under Tiedemannia terefifolia) , who cited a speci- 

 men from Harper's Ferry (which was then in Virginia, but is 

 now at the eastern corner of West Virginia), collected by Dr. 

 W. E, A. Aikin. (This locality is given as the northeastern 

 limit of the species in all editions of Gray's Manual between that 

 time and 1869, when Mr. Canby discovered in Delaware the 

 variety which now bears his name.) As Harper's Ferry is on 

 the Potomac River in the mountains, like Hancock, and only 

 35 miles southeast of that place, I at once suspected that this 

 plant must be about the same as Dr. Shreve's. On looking up 

 the specimen in question, which is still preserved in the Torrey 

 Herbarium,. I found that what there is of it agrees very well 

 with the one from near Hancock, even to being in the same 

 immature stage. But it is such a poor specimen, that it is no 

 wonder that no one ever noticed any essential difference between 

 it and the specimens of Oxypolis among which it had presumably 

 been lying for seventy years or so. The main stem had been 

 bitten off (as was noted on the label), and curiously enough this 

 was the case with most of the type specimens from Georgia; 

 which would seem to indicate that cattle are rather fond of this 

 plant. No indication of habitat was given on Dr. Aikin's label, 

 but it is reasonable to assume that it was collected on the shore 

 of one of the two rivers which come together at Harper's Ferry. 



