Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/744

728 Northern fox-grape, Vitis labrosca, is wholly confined to the Atlantic States, except that it reappears in Japan and that region. Wistaria was named for a woody leguminous climber, with showy blossoms; native of the Middle Atlantic States. The other species which we prize so highly in cultivation, W. sinensis, is from China, as its name indicates, or perhaps only from Japan, where it is certainly indigenous. Our yellow-wood (cladrastis) inhabits a very limited district on the western slope of the Alleghanies. Its only and very near relative (maackia) is in Mantchooria. The hydrangeas have some species in our Alleghany region. All the rest belong to the Chino-Japanese region and its continuation westward. The same may be said of the Syringas (Philadelphus), except that there are one or two nearly the same in California and Oregon. Our blue choste (cantophyllum) is confined to the woods of the Atlantic States, but has lately been discovered in Japan. A peculiar relative of it, diphyllæ, confined to the higher Alleghanies, is also repeated in Japan, with a slight difference, so that it may largely be distinguished as another species. Another relative is our twin-leaf (Jeffersonia) of the Alleghany region alone. A second species has lately turned up in Mantchooria. A relative of this is podophyllum, our mandrake, a common inhabitant of the Atlantic United States, but found nowhere else. There is one other species of it, and that is in the Himalayas. Here are four most peculiar genera of one family, each of a single species in the Atlantic United States, which are duplicated on the other side of the world, either in identical or almost identical species, or in an analogous species, while nothing else of the kind is known in any other part of the world. I ought not to omit ginseng, the root so prized by the Chinese, and which they obtained from their northern provinces and Mantchooria. We have it also from Corea and Northern Japan. The Jesuit fathers identified the plant in Canada and the Atlantic States, brought it in the Chinese name by which we know it, and established the trade in it, which was for many years most profitable. The exportation of ginseng to China probably has not yet entirely ceased. Whether the Northeastern Asiatic and the Atlantic American ginsengs are exactly of the same species or not is somewhat uncertain, but they are hardly if at all distinguishable. There is a shrub—ellittia—which is so rare and local that it is known only at two stations on the Savannah River, in Georgia. It is of peculiar structure, and was without near relative until one was lately discovered in Japan (in Triwitalavia) so like it as hardly to be distinguishable, except by having the parts of the blossom in threes instead of fours. We suppose ellittia had happened to be collected only once, a good while ago, and all knowledge of the limited and secluded locality was lost; and meanwhile the Japanese form came to be known. Such a case would be paralleled with an actual one. A specimen of a peculiar plant was detected in the herbarium of the elder Michaux, who collected it (as his autograph ticket shows)