On June 28, 1968, on top of the mountain (elev. about 2,500 ft.) above Jenkin Jones, McDowell County, West Virginia, I found about two dozen plants of Cleistes divaricata (L.) Ames var. bifaria Fernald. The plants were scattered over an open area and associated with huckleberries, mountain laurel, and Vaccinium stamineum. Although current manuals report this species for the Cumberland Plateau of Kentucky, this is the first record for West Virginia.
In a recent issue of Castanea (33: 123-135. 1968) my paper, “Contributions to the Flora of Florida—4, Fimbristylis (Cyperaceae)'”, used the long accepted name Fimbristylis monostachya (L.) Hassk. for a pantropic species found on calcareous soils in Dade and Monroe counties, Florida, with one outlying station known in Citrus County. This distinctive sedge has at times been treated as a segregate under the name Abildgaardia monostachya (L.) Vahl (e. g., J. K. Small, 1933). These names are based on Cyperus monostachyos, a 1771 name and description by Linnaeus (Mantissa Plantarum 180), and are supported by a specimen in the Linnaean herbarium.
In a state as well botanized as Illinois there are certainly very few native woody plants that have remained undiscovered to the present time. Therefore, I was quite surprised to find a stand of the Big Leaf Snowbell Bush (Styrax grandifolia Ait.) in southern Illinois.
Ice Mountain is located near North River Mills, Hampshire County, West Virginia, and extends for about five miles in a northeast-southwest direction along North River. The mountain rises from an elevation of about 700 feet above sea level at the river to 1,509 feet at the highest point.
Thomas N. McCoy, a well known collector of the Kentucky fern flora, presented a gift of numerous fern specimens to Murray State University in the spring of 1967. These specimens, many determined by R. T. Clausen, E. T. Wherry, and W. H. Wagner, formed a nucleus from which our prior collections by D. F. Austin, J. L. Gentry, G. E. Hunter and H. J. Rogers could be authenticated.
Distribution maps of plants are now appearing in many taxonomic monographs or revisions, local or state floras, or short discussions and notes. These maps usually depict, in more or less detail, the distribution of the taxa as occurring in a general region, a county, or a locality where the plant is known. Various techniques of shading and symbolism (e.g. dots, triangles, circles, numbers, or letters) are employed to show the plant’s distribution. Phytogeographers seeking maps of individual taxa for a particular region, state, etc., must search the literature in order to locate a possibly desirable map. In general, the annual and cumulative indexes of journals containing the above kinds of papers do not inform the reader of such published distribution maps. The Michigan Botanist, for example, is one journal that does index separately the distribution maps of plant taxa that are published in each volume.
Several papers have been published dealing with limited areas of Mississippi; however, only one book, “Plants of Mississippi” by Lowe (1921), has attempted to provide a checklist to include the entire state. The paucity of information about the vascular flora of Mississippi prompted our interest. Mississippi was probably the poorest collected state in the Southeast.
Streams, bryophytes, insects: all these have been studied by many authors, but few have studied the interrelationships of the three in depth. (Thienemann, 1912; Carpenter, 1928; Percival and Whitehead, 1929, 1930; Illies, 1952; and Minckley, 1963, all included mosses in their discussion of stream surveys.) Moreover, even fewer workers have attempted to determine the relationships among insect communities associated with bryophytes in different streams or among several species of bryophytes. Only Frost (1942) compared the fauna of mosses in an acid and an alkaline stream, but she did not separate the moss species in her analysis. Thus, the present study appears to be the first attempt to compare the bryophyte fauna of streams of the Appalachian Mountains in the Deciduous Forest Formation (Braun, 1964).
The first reference to sediments deposited in Lake Monongahela was included in a paper read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Minneapolis by I. C. White in 1883. This talk was published as a short article in the West Virginia University catalog for that year and in the short-lived, but historically very important, journal “The Virginias” (37). In this article, White discussed the theory advanced by G. F. Wright of Oberlin, Ohio (March 7, 1883) in which a glacial dam at Cincinnati was postulated as being responsible for damming of the old Teays River and tributaries. Dr. White elaborated upon the “trash” he had noticed at various elevations along the Monongahela River and suggested that this could also have resulted from the same occurrence. His discussion of the deposits included mention of terrace deposits, including stratified silts, clays, boulder beds and other sediments found at the junction of streams all along the Monongahela, especially those beginning at 100 to 150 feet above the present elevation of the river.