Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by
G E O R G E P . P U T N A M & CO.,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.
C A M B R ID G E :
METCALF AND COMl'ANy, BlilNTEP.S TO THE UNIVERSITY.
T h e following pages are designed to contain brief descriptions
of all the Musci and H b p a t ic a j hitherto detected
in that portion of the United States lying east of the
Mississippi River. A few species found elsewhere, either
new, or having a geographical range heretofore unnoticed,
or for some other special reason, have also been described;
namely, those from Texas and New Mexico, and also
several from near our northern boundary, and likely to
occur within it.
The territory within the limits adopted — extending, as
it does, iroin 25° to 47° North Latitude, and traversed for
nearly its entire length by mountain ranges, reaching, at
several points in their northern and southern terminations,
an alpine elevation— presents conditions favorable to a
copious and varied muscological vegetation. And if the
number of species here recorded is not so large as that
found in an equal area similarly situated on the Eastern
Continent, it must be borne in mind that our Bryology
and Hepaticology (particularly the latter) have thus far
been very imperfectly investigated. Scarcely any portion
of our country, excepting Central Ohio, has been carefully
examined. The mountain ranges have only been cursorily
visited by a few interested in these branches of Botany.
In the northern section, notwithstanding numerous discoveries
made by the late Mr. O a k e s , and the more re-
cent ones (among them a Dichehjma, a Tetrodontium, and