146 



some negro houses which were plainly visible across the rail- 

 road. A letter received quite recently from Mrs. Lillian V. 

 Porter, an amateur botanist of Chattanooga, Tenn., whom I 

 had told about this find, states that she had a cook who came 

 from a negro settlement a few miles from Stevenson, and said 

 the people there cultivated the calamus ("calomel root," as 

 they called it), and used it medicinally. A few plants that I saw 

 along a partly shaded small stream in the western edge of 

 Hamilton, Alabama, on June 2, 1936, were said to have been 

 planted there by negroes. 



During a visit to Atlanta at the end of October, 1936, while 

 most of this article was in the hands of the editor or printers, I 

 picked up an interesting bit of evidence. A friend who helped me 

 verify the "Uncle Remus" reference (dimly remembered after 

 more than forty years) in his collection of Georgia books, asked 

 his negro cook if she knew anything about calamus. She replied 

 that she had some of it growing in a box on her back porch ; and 

 she brought a leaf the next morning for verification. 



When once established the plant seems to propagate in- 

 definitely by rootstocks, and that doubtless explains why it 

 seldom fruits, as noted by Britton and Brown. The same tend- 

 ency is exhibited by numerous other plants. 



As for its distribution in states adjacent to Alabama, Gat- 

 tinger's observations in Tennessee have already been quoted. 

 I have been in every county in Georgia but one, without ever 

 seeing it there, but could have overlooked it, as previously sug- 

 gested. The author of "Uncle Remus," who seems to have been 

 familiar with the plant, lived in Georgia all his life, and may 

 have known of one or more localities for it, wild or cultivated. 

 Wood and McCarthy listed it in their Wilmington (N. C.) 

 flora, 1887, but without comment. 



Chapman's report of it from Florida may have been au- 

 thentic, though he did not specify any locality, and it does not 

 seem to have been confirmed by any recent observations. Dr. 

 E. N. Lowe, in his Plants of Mississippi (Miss. Geol. Surv. Bull. 

 17. 1921), says of it: "In ponds, South Mississippi (Wailes). 

 Lafayette Co." 



It would be interesting to have testimony from others who 

 may have seen acorus anywhere in the United States where 

 it appears to be indigenous, or who have reliable records of its 



