2 MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
Anemone Nuttalliana, Argemone platycerus, 
ES Caroliniana, Draba cuneifolia, 
parviflora, Erysimum asperum, 
Ranunculus affinis, Thely podium pinnatifidum, 
x rhomboideus, t leome integrifolia, 
Clematis Pitcheri, Viola pedatifida, 
Es Fremonti, ** -Nuttallii, 
Delphinium azureum, Geum triflorum, 
All these are from the earliest pages of the old manuals, and, 
if we were to proceed to the Leguminosae, there we should find 
whole genera ascribed to the Prairie regions in this same way. 
There is Baptisia with six species, Dalea with four, Petalostemon 
with five, Astragalus with sixteen, Oxytropis with three, all these 
genera either fully represented to the eastward of Indiana, or not all: 
while such types as Glycyrrhiza, Hoffmanseggia, Desmanthus, and 
Schrankia, are unknown except from Illinóis westward. 
It is the most primitive books of the United States botany— 
those printed before the field of the Middle West had received any- 
thing more than casual notice—which thus show in the aggregate 
some scores of plant-types unknown to the eastward of Michigan 
and Indiana. Today there is evidence that a new era for middle 
western nature study is upon the dawn. At least as regards plant 
life and form it is tacitly conceded, if not openly, that the field was 
formerly too much neglected. Between the New Gray’s Manual 
lately issued, and the earlier editions there are contrasts which tell 
strongly in favor of the idea that the Prairie Region plant 
world is a thing as much apart from that of New England and New 
York, as it is from that of the Gulf States. (Compare this new 
edition of Gray with the sixth, which preceded it by less than 
twenty years. Up to within a few years, according to all the books, 
among the commoner trees there was one kind of wild crab-apple, 
Pyrus coronaria,—indigenous to the whole North all the way from 
New York across to Kansasand Minnesota. The latter proposition 
is that the above name formerly, and wrongly, was madeto embrace 
two different species, P. coronaria of the Middle States and P. 
Iowensis, restricted to the Prairie Midland country. All except the 
most recent books tell of only one sort of Virginia Creeper—Am- 
pelopsis—common from the shores of the Atlantic north and south 
to away beyond the Mississippi. The newest manual names four 
different kinds, two of which are characteristic of the Midland 
Section. Akin to the Crab-apple is the genus Crataegus, which 
according to the older standards, exhibited a number of species 
