122 : Rhodora [JULY 
until cut through by other streams. Here was an ideal place to study 
the vegetation of a highly calcareous region side by side with the 
plants of a silicious and gneissoid area, and if anyone doubts the dis- 
similarities of these floras he can find no better spot in which to un- 
deceive himself than at Blanc Sablon. And if he is received with 
the hospitality and desire to make his stop successful which were 
extended to us by our wide-awake host, Mr. Edwin G. Grant, manager 
of the cod-fishing ‘‘room,” and his son and daughter in their large 
and comfortable summer residence — more than a hundred years 
old, but with electric push-buttons, typewriter and other signs of 
contact with the world not looked for on the Labrador as ordinarily 
described; or if he is entertained as we were by Mr. Grant’s friendly 
rival and neighbor, Mr. Thomas Morel, manager of the fishery on 
the Canadian side, and his good wife, with pictures and accounts of 
their home in Jersey, with music ‘and discussions of European galler- 
ies and theatres, and with lettuce salad dressed with real Jersey cream 
and a sight of their garden with a patch of carefully sheltered cucum- 
bers coming on; he will feel that the open-handed hospitality which 
we read of in early accounts of the Hudson Bay Company is equally 
dispensed by the Labrador fisherman. 
e botanizing at Blanc Sablon furnished such an embarrass- 
ment of riches that it is now possible to mention only a few 
characteristic plants. As representative a day as any was Saturday, 
August 6, the last field-day I had there. Starting from the settlement 
on the Labrador side, where the shore is bordered by a broad strand- 
terrace of gneissoid gravel and sand covered by a broad belt of Strand 
Wheat (Elymus arenarius), with Catabrosa aquatica, Montia lam- 
prosperma Cham.,' Stellaria crassifolia, and Ranunculus hyperboreus 
Rottb., a little creeping buttercup with only 3 lemon-yellow petals, 
in the damp hollows, I made my way through the group of Esqui- 
maux dogs, which all summer hang about the fishery, across the sandy 
and rocky plain which extends from the river to the terrace-slope. 
As I remember writing home, the commonest flower of these Laurentian 
plains is Carex rariflora, though with singular regard for its specific 
name it is by all means the rarest of its genus in New England. In 
some places on the drier part of the plain the turf was composed of 
Carex stylosa C. A. Meyer, an Alaskan species which, like many other 
Alaskan plants, reappears along the Straits of Belle Isle. In the 
1 See Fernald & Wiegand, Ruopora, xii. 138 (1910). 
