GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
These plants are unquestionably allied to andropogon in their mode of flowering, but have nevertheless sufficient essential characters to distinguish them. In habit, they appear but slightly similar. They differ principally from their congeners in the pedicellate character of their neutral florets. The spikes are not axillary in either of them. The branches are axillary, of which several sometimes originate from the same axil in the R. corrugata. Each spike, when fully evolved, is not only pedicellate, but the pedicel, or peduncle, is connected with a culm containing one, two, or more joints.[53] The culm is not compressed, nor the leaves long in the R. ciliata, as stated by Mr. Nuttall, who appears to have confounded the two species in these, and some other instances. The joints of the rachis in both are fragile, the joints of the culm in neither.
Another species noticed by Michaux, and included in all our books as the R. dimidiata, L. has long been familiar to the southern botanists. Whether this be the dimidiata found also on the sandy shores of India, or the compressa of the same country, as suggested by Mr. Elliott, or a species distinct from either, I am not prepared to determine. But I have collected this plant in the Bermudian Isles, at Rio de Janeiro, and Bahia, on the Brazilian coast, and lastly on the island of Flores, near one hundred miles from the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, as well as on the main in the Banda Oriental.
Art. VII. Floral Calendar kept at Deerfield, Massachusetts, with Miscellaneous Remarks.
Art. VII. Floral Calendar kept at Deerfield, Massachusetts, with Miscellaneous Remarks, by Dr. Stephen W. Williams, of Deerfield.
To Professor Silliman.
Sir,
Any thing which has a tendency to elicit facts with regard to the climate of a country must be interesting. I believe that observations upon the time of the germination, foliation, florification, and fructification of plants, afford a much more correct criterion respecting climate than thermometrical, or other meteorological journals. They should be made at the same time in various parts of the country, and for several years in succession. I send you a Calendarium Floræ, with miscellaneous remarks, made in Deerfield, Massachusetts, during a part of the years 1811, 1812, and 1818, which, if you please, you may insert in your valuable Journal. Latitude of Deerfield, 42° 32′ 32″, longitude 72° 41′.
1811.