or the Barbary states. Some other things have given equally great 
difficulty and forced me to make a thorough study of Sonchus and some 
other genera. 
I have looked again casually at our common Brake and notice one 
or two other characters which are rather conspicuous, although I am 
not able to find any character in the sporangia and spores. One of 
the most striking things is that the European material has the fruit¬ 
ing fronds dark with the densely crowded sporangia, those from the 
two margins nearly meeting in the middle, while ours have much narrow¬ 
er bands of sporangia with a broad open space between. Phis holds in 
eastern America, at least, and in eastern Asia, but I have not been 
over all the material yet to see whether it is good in the west. 
I notice that you have some recent records of Bidens trichosperma 
from the Hartford region which especially interest me since I have been 
d«p.£ing into that group in the last few days. I find that we have no 
material except a young fragment from H. S. Clark and that is certainly 
not good B. trichosperma nor any of its varieties, but I am unable to 
say exactly what it is from this material. B. trichosperma proper 
seems to be a prairie plant with very large achenes and long awns (2-4 
mm. long). We do not get it east of Cayuga Lake but it runs around the 
southern end of the Alleghenies and comes up the coastal or Piedmont 
country as far as western New Jersey. Our plant of the Cape Cod cran¬ 
berry bogs ( of southwestern Rhode Island and of eastern Massachusetts, 
Norfolk County to Essex County, always in sphagnous bogs or swales, has 
the achenes much smaller and with the awns from mere rudiments to about 
1 mm. long. Phis is Gray’s var. tenuiloba . which reappeared in the 
