— 1 oo — 
erable labor to read through two long descriptions, comparing them charac- 
ter by character, in order to find out in what respect the plants differ. By 
confining the descriptions to diagnoses or by giving the diagnostic characters 
in italics, this annoyance might easily have been avoided with great benefit 
to those who are to use the book. 
The lichens found in Minnesota are, for the most part, those occurring 
throughout temperate North America, east of the Rocky Mountains. For 
all students in this region, Professor Fink's “ Lichens of Minnesota,” with its 
keys, its descriptions, its photographs, and last but not least its conservative 
spirit, must prove a work of the very greatest usefulness. 
Wellesley, Mass. 
POLYTRICHUM STRICTUM IN PENNSYLVANIA. 
Otto E. Jennings. 
In the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania, near Linesville, in Craw- 
ford County, there is a great area of swampy or boggy land lying to the 
south of a row of morainal hills. This area collectively is known as the 
Pymatuning Swamp and extends with one interruption for a distance of 
about seventeen miles and in one place is about one mile wide. 
During the last six years the writer has made repeated excursions to- 
this swamp, studing the flora both ecologically and systematically, and a 
number of very interesting things, botanically speaking, are to be found 
there. The bog is in places a very characteristic Canadian Tamarack- 
Sphagnum bog {Larix-Sphagnu 7 n association) and in places has become 
southern in its relationship, with a Black Ash-Lizard Tail swamp {Fraxinus 
nigra-Sanrurus association). 
In one place near Linesville there is a small area, not over half-an-acre 
in extent, where the vegetation is made up exclusively of a Cassandra-Poly- 
trichum heath, and it was with considerable surprise and interest that the moss 
was found to be typical Polytrichum strictum Banks. (Collected 
May 28, 1908, O. E. Jennings.) 
The occurrence here of this species of Polytrichum is noteworthy in that 
the species is so distinctly northern in its distribution and as far south as 
the northern states it is mainly restricted to rather elevated boggy alpine 
regions. So far as the writer is aware this species has never before been 
reported from either Pennsylvania or from Ohio, whose boundry line is but 
a few miles distant, and, furthermore, the moss occurs here at a compara- 
tively low elevation, about 980 feet above the sea. 
Carnegie Museum, August 22, 1910. 
NOTES FROM EUROPE. 
Annie Lorenz. 
The following are brief notes of the writer’s collecting experiences on a 
European trip, not undertaken primarily for botanical purposes, in the early 
summer of 1909. 
The writer’s first European botanizing was at Burgsteinfurt, a small 
town in Westfalen; her first walk in the Bagno, the Prinz von Bentheim’s. 
