Vol. 6 No. ID 



TORREYA 



October, igo6 



MIDWINTER OBSERVATIONS IN SOUTHEASTERN librarv 

 MISSISSIPPI AND EASTERN LOUISIANA new vow k 



botank 



By Roland M. Harper (lAfijH: 



On the way to and from the meetings of the American Asso- 

 ciation for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans last win- 

 ter I passed through some parts of Mississippi and Louisiana which 

 have rarely if ever been mentioned in botanical literature, and 

 were of particular interest for that reason, as well as for their 

 similarity to some parts of the coastal plain of Georgia which I 

 had been studying for several years ; and I was able to make a 

 few observations en route which seem worth preserving. 



Although many plants from various parts of Mississippi — 

 chiefly from along the coast — have been distributed in recent 

 years to the larger herbaria of the country by Tracy, Earle, 

 Pollard, Kearney, Lloyd and others, none of these specimens 

 that I have seen are accompanied by any information as to their 

 surroundings in nature, and very little has been published about 

 the vegetation of the Mississippi mainland in modern times. In 

 fact there seems to be as yet no better account of the phytogeog- 

 raphy of the whole state than Dr. E. W. Hilgard's " Report on 

 the Geology and Agriculture of the State of Mississippi," which 

 appeared in i860. And in this admirable work, though the 

 descriptions of purely geographical features can hardly be 

 improved on even at the present day, the native plants are men- 

 tioned only incidentally, and a complete enumeration of them is 

 not attempted. Moreover, this report was written when there 

 was no better manual for the region than Torrey & Gray's 



[No. 9, Vol. 6, of ToRREYA, comprising pages 181-196, was issued September 

 27, 1906.] 



197 



