THE BOTANY OF CENTRAL ILLINOIS. 7 
June. These families of plants which you have mentioned 
as nearly absent from your flora are the very ones which fur- 
nish our spring with all her glories.” And we must admit 
that the loss from our vernal list of the Kalmias, Azaleas, 
and less gorgeous but more lovely members of the same 
family is almost an irreparable one; nevertheless if our bo- 
tanical confrére of the East will favor us with a visit next 
spring we will gladly satisfy him that we are not without our 
share of vernal beauties. Although the composites are more 
especially the flowers of the prairie, and we are obliged to 
wait for the intense rays of the summer sun to call them 
forth, yet there are a few charming ones among them, the 
brilliant Phlox maculata, which is, as it deserves to be, a fre- 
quent tenant of the gardens at the East, also the pretty Hous- 
tonia purpurea, equally as long as its congener of the New 
England meadows, H. cerulea. 
But we shall not take our guest to the prairie for our first 
excursion. We shall prefer a visit to yonder belt of timber, 
which we see a few miles in the distance. There we shall 
doubtless find a running stream with shady bank, and beyond 
a tract of what is called in western parlance “bottom land,” 
which is simply an open plain, slightly elevated above the 
low banks of the stream, surrounded by and sometimes cov- 
ered with timber, and which has a flora different from that of 
the prairie. 
From the moment we enter the timber we find a profusion 
of flowers. Scattered over all the shaded slopes grows the 
graceful but odd looking Dicentra cucullaria. We say odd 
looking, because the shape of the flower is so remarkably 
similar to the outline of a common house fly. Nestling close 
beside some decaying log we may, perhaps, find Dicentra 
Canadensis with its pure white heart-shaped flowers, not less 
interesting than its more common sister species. Yonder we 
see an extensive patch of Mertensia Virginica, which with- 
its nodding clusters of richest blue presents a picture of sur- 
