172 I,BAFI,ETS. 



sepals deltoid-ovate, short, abruptly acute ; follicles compar- 

 atively short, stout, straight, slightly divergent from base to 

 apex. 



The species as to character, and hydrophile nature, is anal- 

 ogous to my A. album, which is of the Potomac shores and 

 southward, while this which I name A. littorale is as restricted 

 to brook and river margins at a northerly latitude. The speci- 

 mens which I take for typical were sent me in 1902 from 

 " gravelly shores of the Farmington River," in Connecticut, 

 as collected 12 Aug., 1902, by Mr. I^uman Andrews of South - 

 ington. The plants were in good fruit, but past flowering. 

 I did not know, and do not yet know, the flowers of this 

 plant ; but after comparison of its fruiting specimens with 

 those of A. album in fruit, I saw that here was a species yet 

 undescribed, of the same group, and of the same habitat as to 

 its love of being near running water, though of another geo- 

 graphic and climatic region. I labelled my specimens as new, 

 but imperfectly known. In 1910, in eastern New York — I think 

 it was at Pine Plains — I saw in passing by rail, stream mar- 

 gins almost hedged in by the copiousness of a smallish dog- 

 bane which I at the time believed to be what I am now call- 

 ing A . littorale. The dense masses of it were one mark by 

 which, as growing, it would be suspected as being other than 

 A. album., for this always grows sparingly, in small colonies, 

 and only here and there ; but the characters by which to know 

 each species in fruit, and when dry, are those of the follicles. 

 These in A. littorale are stout, 3 to 3J^ inches long, both of 

 equal length and of like angles of divergence. In A. album 

 they are not only more slender, but measure 3 J^ to 4J^ inches 

 long, one of them straight, the other so curved that the two 

 meet and are in contact at the tip ; or, when not in actual 

 contact, are so very near it that as a general characteristic the 

 plain curvature of the one it is impossible to overlook when 

 once it has been pointed out. 



Another Connecticut station for A. littorale would seem to 

 be Stratford, whence a good fruiting specimen is in U. S. 

 Herb. as collected on "adry beach," by Dr. Bdwin H. Kames. 



