
1130 The American Naturalist. [ December 
fruiting plentifully, but in thickets becoming five to ten feet high. 
Its silvery whitish foliage and fruit make this shrub a very conspicuous 
and characteristic element of the Red River flora. 
‘« The single species of true sage-brush belonging to this basin (47¢e- 
mista cana Pursh) extends east in North Dakota to the Heart Mound, 
six miles northwest of Walhalla, or thirty-five miles west of the Red 
River at Pembina, and to a hill close west of the Cheyenne River 
about eight miles south of Valley City, growing in both places on out- 
crops of the Fort Pierre shale. It attains a height of one to three feet, 
and the tough wood of its base is one to one and a half inches in 
diameter. Artemisia frigida Willd., called ‘ pasture sage-brush’ by 
Macoun, is abundant throughout a wide area westward, extending east 
locally to ‘the ridge’ east of Emerson, Manitoba, the Falls of St. 
Anthony, and Lake Pepin.” 
The Bearberry in Central Nebraska.—Another of the puzzles 
in the geographical botany of the plains has recently turned up in the 
discovery of the bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi Spreng.) in a cañon 
in Custer county, in the center of the state. When it is remembered 
that this station is midway between the Missouri River and the foot- 
hills of the Rocky Mountains, and that the plains extend for hundreds 
of miles in every direction, and further, that it is in what is known as 
the ‘‘sand-hill belt,’’ it puzzles one to account for the presence of this 
unlooked-for shrub. 
Bearberry occurs in the Black Hills and in the Rocky Mountains. 
Northeastward its nearest station is near Lake Pepin in Minnesota. It 
does not occur in Iowa. In Missouri it occurs in the southeastern 
Kansas plants. 
The Nebraska station is in the basin of the Loup River, a stream 
whose numerous branches are wholly confined to the central part of the 
state, all having their sources in the numberless springs of the ‘‘ sand- 
hills.” How did the Nebraska bearberry find its way to this out-of- 
the-way spot ?— CHARLES E. Brssry. 


