70 
PROSTRATE WILLOW. 
with in the Rocky Mountain range, on the borders of 
Bear river, a clear rapid brook cutting its way through 
basaltic dykes to the curious lake of Timpanagos, in 
New, Mexico. This locality is likewise famous for the 
numerous seltzer springs so strongly impregnated with 
carbonic acid as to sparkle and effervesce like cham- 
paigne. Our hunters called them the “Beer Springs,” 
and for a day and a half that we spent at this memo- 
rable place, the waters afforded us a most delicious 
treat during the warm weather, in those arid plains. 
In an open marshy situation, on the margin of the river 
forest, grew an abundance of this curious, depressed and 
hoary shrub, which has somewhat the aspect of the 
European Sand Willow, ($. arenaria ,) but it is much 
more dwarf, with the leaves smaller, and always hoary 
with pubescence. The stem branches from the base only 
rising four or five inches above the surface of the earth, 
but with many diffuse, tough, woody branches, which 
spread out into a circle of a foot or more. The root 
stock is woody and thick; the branches full of cicatrices, 
pubescent, but brown beneath, thickly covered with 
small leaves, which in some plants are elliptic-ovate, in 
others oblong-lanceolate, all very entire, nearly sessile 
and acute, from half an inch to an inch long, about three 
lines wide; above always grey with pubescence, but 
beneath rather whitely villous; some of the lowest small 
leaves are smooth on the upper surface. There are no 
stipules in any of my specimens. The male flowers I 
have not seen. The fertile catkins are short and some- 
what clustered, not cylindric, few flowered, the capsules 
oblong-lanceolate and short, villous, with appressed 
hairs, not densely lanuginous, as in S. arenaria , termi- 
nated by a short slender style and four short stigmas. 
