62 MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
finest of them all, never chanced upon before in all my boyish 
botanizings. In my simplicity and ignorance I wondered if any 
one else had seen this curious glorious flower that hid itself away 
far from any path, in the most obscure shade of the woodland bank. 
I took it, root and all, to my home a mile away, purposing to make 
enquiry whether any one else had ever seen the plant and hada 
name for it. Several of my elders recognized it, and one of them 
said its name was Adam and Eve. I seem to have had the sense 
not to commit it to my mother’s flower garden, but chose for it a 
shaded and precipitous bank close by; the sweet birch bushes and 
Kalmias, with the partridge berry (Mitchella repens) forming al- 
most a turf at the place. As I remember with perfect distinctness, - 
my transfer of the plant was to an exceedingly different spot, 
ecologically considered, from that in which I had found it; for there. 
I had observed no kalmia, no betula, no mitchella, but only oak and 
hickory trees and hazel bushes, everything deciduous; the soil light 
and loose, of leaf mould; whereas in the proposed new habitat, the 
ground was clayey, also a little sandy. My transferred specimen 
did not reappear at all next season. Its new environment seems to 
have been fatal to it. Nevertheless, allowed to choose for itself, I 
know of no orchid, and of few other woodland plants, any ry: 
one of which adapts itself to greater diversities of climate, soil and 
ecologic consociation. . 
My second meeting with this same orchid was at a station about 
one thousand miles westward from Rhode Island, where the climate _ 
is much more severe, where also both the nature of the soil in 
which it grew, and the plant association, were about as different as 
imaginable considering that the parallel of latitude is approximately 
same. This, my second locality, was in the midst of a larch 
swamp in southern Wisconsin. Here Cypripedium acaule would _ 
have to be classed as a bog plant; for a larch swamp in Wisconsin 1$ . 
a very wet place; usually almost wholly sphagnous. In some parts | 
of it the only way of getting about without wading, or else sinking 
deeply into the watery-spongy masses of sphagnum was to step 
from one to another of the large superficial and horizontally spread- 
ing roots of the larches. Under the coarse network of these roots . 
-~ seemed to be nothing but water. P 
The sphagnous border encircling the central forests of tam- 1] 
racks, or larches, yielded plentifully such interesting boreal shrubs . 
| as were then known by the names of Cassandra calyculata, Andro- 
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