444 EXPLOEATIONS ACROSS THE GREAT BASIN OF UTAH. 



COMPOSITE. 



The name of "Wild Sage", now so familiar to every traveller in our western mount- 

 ain-deserts, was first used by Lewis and Clarke, in the narrative of their adventurous 

 expedition, to designate several species of Artemisia or Wormwood, distantly resembling 

 the true garden sage, Salvia officinalis, by their gray foliage and aromatic odor. It seems 

 that now this name has, by common use, been restricted to the larger shrubby species, 

 which give a peculiar character to the arid plateaus of Western North America, and which 

 are of the highest importance to the traveller as "furnishing the sole article of fuel or shel- 

 ter which they meet in wandering over these woodless deserts", as already Nuttall informs 

 us in his genera of North American Plants, 2, p. 142. He states that the " Wild Sage" is 

 Ins Artemisia Cotwnbiensis, which name was by him improperly substituted for the prior 

 name of J. cana, described by Pursh from the original specimens of Lewis and Clarke. 

 Torre v and G ray, in their Flora of N. America, 2, p. 418, doubt whether this really is 

 the "Wild Sage" of those travelers, and come to the conclusion that that name was 

 indiscriminately applied to several shrubby species; they further state that the plant 

 given by Governor Lewis to Pursh as "the Sage" is the herbaceous A. Ludoviciana 

 found on the homeward voyage on the Missouri River. 



I have now the means, through information obtained from Mr. II. Engelmann and 

 from Dr. F. M. Hayden, to throw a little more light on this question, which is not 

 without importance for botanical geography. The two species here in question are— 



Artemisia cana, Pursh, Fl.Am. sept. 2, p. 521; Torrey and Gray, Fl, N. Am. 2, p. 

 418.— Shrubby, with woody stem 2-4 inches in diameter, 2-4 feet (on the Yellowstone, 

 Dr. Hayden) or 2-6 feet high (on the Laramie Plains, H. Engelmann). Stem covered 

 with a light-gray bark, which is separated into many layers of loose shreds connected 

 by smaller transverse fibers, and is readily torn off. Wood light, porous, pale-colored, 

 with very many darker brown medullary rays, easily separating along the division of the 

 annual rings. These rings, or layers, are from J-l line in thickness, as stems of 1J-2 

 inches diameter show about a dozen rings, and are consequently as many years old. The 

 stems are rarely cylindrical, but mostly compressed, knotty, and variously twisted, and 

 often stunted; they are sometimes divided from the base, but oftener bear short and thick 

 branches higher up. The annual branchlets are crowded along the older branches, 

 8-12 inches long, densely coated with a soft, white pubescence, and crowded with 

 silvery-gray leaves, and bear toward their upper part and on the numerous short and 

 erect lateral branchlets a profusion of small flower-heads, forming a spiked or con- 

 tracted panicle, interspersed with short leaves. The leaves are flat, linear-lanceolate, 

 entire or (the lower ones) rarely lobed, 1-2 or 2 J lines wide and 1 J-2 inches long, 

 the upper ones becoming smaller. The flower-heads are mostly sessile, or nearly so, 

 hemispherical, about 2 lines long and wide; outer scales of involucrum shorter, folia- 

 ceous, and canescent (sometimes the lowest ones larger than the flowers, and pointed); 

 inner scales^ nearly as long as flowers, brownish, scarious, obtuse, cottony-fimbriate 

 on the margins. The flowers are all perfect, usually 5, in some specimens as many as 

 8 m number, H lines long; ovary glandular-, and, when bruised, with the odor 6f 

 wormwood. 



