48 
THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
to appear in such situations. In the deciduous forests 
which skirt the western shore of Lake Michigan I have 
dug through several inches of snov^ on New Year's day 
and found their nearly developed flowers already pushing 
up through the leaf mold. Closely wrapped in their warm 
gray lurs, the3^ w^ere ready to burst into blossom the 
moment the warm spring sunshine should break through 
their snow3^ cover-lid. In boggy places the flowers of the 
skunk-cabbage {Symplocarpus foetidus) are probably the 
earliest. They often appear before the end of February. 
On the prairies of northern Kansas the beautiful little 
purple and white prairie anemones are usually the first 
flow^ers to be found in Sj)ring. I am inclined to think, 
however, that certain low-flowering, inconspicuous um- 
belliferee are fuWy as earl}'- and in some places the\' prob- 
ably precede the anemones. Farther south in the same 
state the white dog's-tooth violet is the earliest spring 
flower. It is there often called "Easter flower" and is 
usually found to be quite abundant by Easter Sunday. In 
eastern Kansas the "Dutchman's breeches," a delicate 
and beautiful plant despite its unfortunate name, is fully 
as early as the dog's-tooth violets which grow in the 
sunny spots of the praire and it is usually in full bloom 
before the Erythroniums, which are its neighbors in the 
shady w^oods, have begun to blossom. 
Here among the mountains, prairies, and canyons of 
northern Idaho a small buttercup {Ranunculus glaberri- 
mus) is our earliest spring flower. I have found it in 
Sawyer's Canyon as early as the sixteenth of February, 
the ver^^day on which the last traces of a heavy snow-fall, 
which had come a week before, vanished before the warm 
Chinook winds. As one stood at the foot of the canyon 
wall with flowers in bloom and the grass turning green 
all around, he could harbly believe that scarce ten days 
before the ground w^as covered wnth more than a foot of 
snow, with the thermometer so far below the zero mark 
and the air so full of frost that bright "sun dogs," great 
