IT is the tenth of April, and although the skies are clear, and the sun's rays warm enough for early June, yet the Colorado landscape shows no indications of spring. The mountain range which fills the western horizon, is still clad in all the dazzling white of wintry snows, and remains a picture of beauty and sublimity quite indescribable. The plains are brown and bare, as they were during most of the winter. Here and there, tufts of the evergreen Soap-weed (Yucca angustifolia), or matted masses of Prickly Pear, show their perennial verdure, and furnish the only conspicuous signs of plant life. No April showers have fallen to revive the grasses, and the herds of long-horned Texas cattle graze contentedly upon the sere remains of last year's growth. Yet at this early date, there are wild flowers, modest, and lovely April flowers, for the eye that knows where to look for them. Extending all along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, is a series of high and picturesque table-lands, and below and among them, numerous grassy hills and knolls, all destitute of trees, often rocky, and apparently as barren as are the plains around. On sunny slopes, and in sheltered nooks among these foot-hills, we find our earliest flowers. By the first week in April, there appears on the very summits of these grassy knolls a real beauty, which, as it yet lacks an English name, may bear its Latin one, Townsendia (T. sericeca). The plant belongs to the family