FIGHTING PESTS WITH INSECT ALLIES

LELAND O. HOWARD

[Dr. Howard is Chief of the Division of Entomology in the United States Department of Agriculture at Washington. He is a lecturer at Swarthmore College and at Georgetown University. He has written "The Insect Book," published by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York; and a work on Mosquitoes, issued by McClure, Phillips & Co., New York. Both are books of interest from the hand of a master: they are fully illustrated. The narrative which follows appeared in Everybody's Magazine, June, 1901.]

Some twenty-five years ago there appeared suddenly upon certain acacia trees at Menlo Park, California, a very destructive scale bug. It rapidly increased and spread from tree to tree, attacking apples, figs, pomegranates, quinces, and roses, and many other trees and plants, but seeming to prefer to all other food the beautiful orange and lemon trees which grow so luxuriantly on the Pacific Coast, and from which a large share of the income of so many fruit-growers is gained. This insect, which came to be known as the white scale or fluted scale or the Icerya (from its scientific name), was an insignificant creature in itself, resembling a small bit of fluted wax a little more than a quarter of an inch long. But when the scales had once taken possession of a tree, they swarmed over it until the bark was hidden; they sucked its sap through their minute beaks until the plant became so feeble that the leaves and young fruit dropped off, a hideous black smut-fungus crept over the young twigs, and the weakened tree gradually died.

In this way orchard after orchard of oranges, worth a thousand dollars or more an acre, was utterly destroyed; the best fruit-growing sections of the State were invaded, and ruin stared many a fruit-grower in the face. This spread of the pest was gradual, extending through a series of years, and not until 1886 did it become so serious a matter as to attract national attention.

In this year an investigation was begun by the late Professor C. V. Riley, the Government entomologist then connected with the Department of Agriculture at Washington. He sent two agents to California, both of whom immediately began to study the problem of remedies. In 1887 he visited California himself, and during that year published an elaborate report giving the results of the work up to that point. The complete life-history of the insect had been worked out, and a number of washes had been discovered which could be applied to the trees in the form of a spray, and which would kill a large proportion of the pests at a comparatively small expense. But it was soon found that the average fruit-grower would not take the trouble to spray his trees, largely from the fact that he had experimented for some years with inferior washes and quack nostrums, and from lack of success had become disgusted with the whole idea of using liquid compounds. Something easier, something more radical was necessary in his disheartened condition.

Meantime, after much sifting of evidence and much correspondence with naturalists in many parts of the world, Professor Riley had decided that the white scale was a native of Australia, and had been first brought over to California accidentally upon Australian plants. In the same way it was found to have reached South Africa and New Zealand, in both of which colonies it had greatly increased, and had become just such a pest as it is in California. In Australia, however, its native home, it did not seem to be abundant, and was not known as a pest—a somewhat surprising state of affairs, which put the entomologist on the track of the results which proved of such great value to California. He reasoned that, in his native home, with the same food plants upon which it flourished abroad in such great abundance, it would undoubtedly do the same damage that it does in South Africa, New Zealand, and California, if there were not in Australia some natural enemy, probable some insect parasite or predatory beetle, which killed it off. It became therefore important to send a trained man to Australia to investigate this promising line.

After many difficulties in arranging preliminaries relating to the payment of expenses (in which finally the Department of State kindly assisted), one of Professor Riley's assistants, a young German named Albert Koebele, who had been with him for a number of years, sailed for Australia in August, 1888. Koebele was a skilled collector and an admirable man for the purpose. He at once found that Professor Riley's supposition was correct: there existed in Australia small flies which laid their eggs in the white scales, and these eggs hatched into grubs which devoured the pests. He also found a remarkable little ladybird, a small, reddish-brown convex beetle, which breeds with marvellous rapidity and which, with voracious appetite, and at the same time with discriminating taste, devours scale after scale, but eats fluted scales only—does not attack other insects. This beneficial creature, now known as the Australian ladybird, or the Vedalia, Mr. Koebele at once began to collect in large numbers, together with several other insects found doing the same work. He packed many hundreds of living specimens of the ladybird, with plenty of food, in tin boxes, and had them placed on ice in the ice-box of the steamer at Sydney; they were carried carefully to California, where they were liberated upon orange trees at Los Angeles.



These sendings were repeated for several months, and Mr. Koebele, on his return in April, 1889, brought with him many more living specimens which he had collected on his way home in New Zealand, where the same Vedalia had been accidentally introduced a year or so before.



The result more than justified the most sanguine expectations. The ladybirds reached Los Angeles alive, and, with appetites sharpened by their long ocean voyage, immediately fell upon the devoted scales and devoured them one after another almost without rest. Their hunger temporarily satisfied, they began to lay eggs. These eggs hatched in a few days into active grub-like creatures—the larvae of the beetles—and these grubs proved as voracious as their parents. They devoured the scales right and left, and in less than a month transformed once more to beetles.

And so the work of extermination went on. Each female beetle laid on an average 300 eggs, and each of these eggs hatched into a hungry larva. Supposing that one-half of these larvae produced female beetles, a simple calculation will show that in six months a single ladybird became the ancestor of 75,000,000,000 of other ladybirds, each capable of destroying very many scale insects.



Is it any wonder, then, that the fluted scales soon began to disappear? Is it any wonder that orchard after orchard was entirely freed from the pest, until now over a large section of the State hardly an Icerya is to be found? And could a more striking illustration of the value of the study of insects possibly be instanced? In less than a year from the time when the first of these hungry Australians was liberated from his box in Los Angeles the orange trees were once more in bloom and were resuming their old-time verdure—the Icerya had become practically a thing of the past.



This wonderful success encouraged other efforts in the same direction. The State of California some years later sent the same entomologist, Koebele, to Australia to search for some insect enemy of the black scale, an insect which threatened the destruction of the extensive olive orchards of California. He found and successfully introduced another ladybird beetle, known as Rhizobius ventralis, a little dark-coloured creature which has thrived in the California climate, especially near the seacoast, and in the damp air of those regions has successfully held the black scale in check. It was found, however, that back from the seacoast this insect did not seem to thrive with the same vigor, and the black scale held its own. Then a spirited controversy sprung up among the olive-growers, those near the seacoast contending that the Rhizobius was a perfect remedy for the scale, while those inland insisted that it was worthless. A few years later it was discovered that this olive enemy in South Europe is killed by a little caterpillar, which burrows through scale after scale eating out their contents, and an effort was made to introduce the caterpillar into California, but these efforts failed. Within the past two years it has been found that a small parasitic fly exists in South Africa which lays its eggs in the same black scale, and its grub-like larvae eat out the bodies of the scales and destroy them. The climate of the region in which this parasite exists is dry through a large part of the year, and therefore this little parasitic fly, known as Scutellista, was thought to be the needed insect for the dry California regions. With the help of Mr. C. P. Lounsbury, the Government entomologist of Cape Colony, living specimens of this fly were brought to this country, and were colonized in the Santa Clara Valley, near San Jose, California, where they have perpetuated themselves and destroyed many of the black scales, and promise to be most successful in their warfare against the injurious insect.

This same Scutellista parasite had, curiously enough, been previously introduced in an accidental manner into Italy, probably from India, and probably in scale-insects living on ornamental plants brought from India. But in Italy it lives commonly in another scale insect, and with the assistance of the learned Italian, Professor Antonio Berlese, the writer made an unsuccessful attempt to introduce and establish it a year earlier in some of our Southern States, where it was hoped it would destroy certain injurious insects known as "wax scales."

In the meantime the United States, not content with keeping all the good things to herself, has spread the first ladybird imported—the Vedalia—to other countries. Four years ago the white scale was present in enormous numbers in orange groves on the left bank of the river Tagus, in Portugal, and threatened to wipe out the orange-growing industry in that country. The California people, in pursuance of a far-sighted policy, had with great difficulty, owing to lack of food, kept alive some colonies of the beneficial beetle, and specimens were sent to Portugal which reached there alive and flourishing. They were tended for a short time, and then liberated in the orange groves, with precisely the same result as in California. In a few months the scale insects were almost entirely destroyed, and the Portuguese orange-growers saved from enormous loss.

This good result in Portugal was not accomplished without opposition. It was tried experimentally at the advice of the writer, and in the face of great incredulity on the part of certain Portuguese newspapers and of some officials. By many prominent persons the account published of the work of the insect in the United States was considered as untrustworthy, and simply another instance of American boasting. But the opposition was overruled, and the triumphant result silenced all opposition. It is safe to say that the general opinion among Portuguese orange-growers to-day is very favourable to American enterprise and practical scientific acumen.

The Vedalia was earlier sent to the people in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, where a similar scale was damaging the fig trees and other valuable plants, and the result was again the same, the injurious insects were destroyed. This was achieved only after extensive correspondence and several failures. The active agent in Alexandria was Rear Admiral Blomfield, of the British Royal Navy, a man apparently of wide information, good judgment, and great energy.

The same thing occurred when the California people sent this saviour of horticulture to South Africa, where the white scale had also made its appearance.

It is not only beneficial insects, however, which are being imported, but diseases of injurious insects. In South Africa the colonists suffer severely from swarms of migratory grasshoppers, which fly from the north and destroy their crops. They have discovered out there a fungus disease, which under favorable conditions kills off the grasshoppers in enormous numbers. At the Bacteriological Institute in Grahamstown, Natal, they have cultivated this fungus in culture tubes, and have carried it successfully throughout the whole year; and they have used it practically by distributing these culture tubes wherever swarms of grasshoppers settle and lay their eggs. The disease, once started in an army of young grasshoppers, soon reduces them to harmless numbers. The United States Government last year secured culture tubes of this disease, and experiments carried on in Colorado and in Mississippi show that the vitality of the fungus had not been destroyed by its long ocean voyage, and many grasshoppers were killed by its spread. During the past winter other cultures were brought over from Cape Colony, and the fungus is being propagated in the Department of Agriculture for distribution during the coming summer in parts of the country where grasshoppers may prove to be destructively abundant.



Although we practically no longer have those tremendous swarms of migratory grasshoppers which used to come down like devastating armies in certain of our Western States and in a night devour everything green, still, almost every year, and especially in the West and South, there is somewhere a multiplication of grasshoppers to a very injurious degree, and it is hoped that the introduced fungus can be used in such cases.

Persons officially engaged in searching for remedies for injurious insects all over the world have banded themselves together in a society known as the Association of Economic Entomologists. They are constantly interchanging ideas regarding the destruction of insects, and at present active movements are on foot in this direction of interchanging beneficial insects. Entomologists in Europe will try the coming summer to send to the United States living specimens of a tree-inhabiting beetle which eats the caterpillar of the gipsy moth, and which will undoubtedly also eat the caterpillar so common upon the shade-trees of our principal Eastern cities, which is known as the Tussock moth caterpillar. An entomologist from the United States, Mr. C. L. Marlatt, has started for Japan, China, and Java, for the purpose of trying to find the original home of the famous San Jose scale—an insect which has been doing enormous damage in the apple, pear, peach, and plum orchards of the United States—and if he finds the original home of this scale, it is hoped that some natural enemy or parasite will be discovered which can be introduced into the United States to the advantage of our fruit-growers. Professor Berlese of Italy, and Dr. Reh, of Germany, will attempt the introduction into Europe of some of the parasites of injurious insects which occur in the United States, and particularly those of the woolly root-louse of the apple, known in Europe as the "American blight"—one of the few injurious insects which probably went to Europe from this country, and which in the United States is not so injurious as it is in Europe.

It is a curious fact, by the way, that while we have had most of our very injurious insects from Europe, American insects, when accidentally introduced into Europe, do not seem to thrive. The insect just mentioned, and the famous grape-vine Phylloxera, a creature which caused France a greater economic loss than the enormous indemnity which she had to pay to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, are practically the only American insects with which we have been able to repay Europe for the insects which she has sent us. Climatic differences, no doubt, account for this strange fact, and our longer and warmer summers are the principal factor.

It is not alone the parasitic and predaceous insects which are beneficial. A new industry has been brought into the United States during the past two years by the introduction and acclimatization of the little insect which fertilizes the Smyrna fig in Mediterranean countries. The dried-fig industry in this country has never amounted to anything. The Smyrna fig has controlled the dried-fig markets of the world, but in California the Smyrna fig has never held its fruit, the young figs dropping from the trees without ripening. It was found that in Mediterranean regions a little insect, known as the Blastophaga, fertilizes the flowers of the Smyrna fig with pollen from the wild fig which it inhabits. The United States Department of Agriculture in the spring of 1899 imported successfully some of these insects through one of its travelling agents, Mr. W. T. Swingle, and the insect was successfully established at Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley. A far-sighted fruit-grower, Mr. George C. Roeding, of Fresno, had planted some years previously an orchard of 5,000 Smyrna fig trees and wild fig trees, and his place was the one chosen for the successful experiment. The little insect multiplied with astonishing rapidity, was carried successfully through the winter of 1899-1900, and in the summer of 1900 was present in such great numbers that it fertilized thousands of figs, and fifteen tons of them ripened. When these figs were dried and packed it was discovered that they were superior to the best imported figs. They contained more sugar and were of a finer flavor than those brought from Smyrna and Algeria. The Blastophaga has come to stay, and the prospects for a new and important industry are assured.

With all these experiments the criticism is constantly made that unwittingly new and serious enemies to agriculture may be introduced. The unfortunate introduction of the English sparrow into this country is mentioned, and the equally unfortunate introduction of the East Indian mongoose into the West Indies as well. The fear is expressed that the beneficial parasitic insects, after they have destroyed the injurious insects, will either themselves attack valuable crops or do something else of an equally harmful nature. But there is no reason for such alarm. The English sparrow feeds on all sorts of things, and the East Indian mongoose, while it was introduced into Jamaica to kill snakes, was found, too late, to be also a very general feeder. As a matter of fact, after the snakes were destroyed, and even before, it attacked young pigs, kids, lambs, calves, puppies, and kittens, and also destroyed bananas, pineapples, corn, sweet potatoes, cocoanuts, peas, sugar corn, meat, and salt provisions and fish. But with the parasitic and predatory insects the food habits are definite and fixed. They can live on nothing but their natural food, and in its absence they die. The Australian ladybird originally imported, for example, will feed upon nothing but scale insects of a particular genus, and, as a matter of fact, as soon as the fluted scales became scarce the California officials had the greatest difficulty in keeping the little beetles alive, and were actually obliged to cultivate for food the very insects which they were formerly so anxious to wipe out of existence! With the Scutellista parasite the same fact holds. The fly itself does not feed, and its young feed only upon certain scale insects, and so with all the rest.

All of these experiments are being carried on by men learned in the ways of insects, and only beneficial results, or at the very least negative ones, can follow. And even where only one such experiment out of a hundred is successful, what a saving it will mean!

We do not expect the time to come when the farmer, finding Hessian fly in his wheat, will have only to telegraph the nearest experiment station, "Send at once two dozen first-class parasites;" but in many cases, and with a number of different kinds of injurious insects, especially those introduced from foreign countries, it is probable that we can gain much relief by the introduction of their natural enemies from their original home.



THE STRANGE STORY OF THE FLOWERS

GEORGE ILES

[From "The Wild Flowers of America," copyright by G. H. Buek & Co., New York, 1894, by their kind permission. The American edition is out of print: the Canadian edition, "Wild Flowers of Canada," is published by Graham & Co., Montreal, Canada. The work describes and illustrates in their natural tints nearly three hundred beautiful flowers.]

Imagine a Venetian doge, a French crusader, a courtier of the time of the second Charles, an Ojibway chief, a Justice of the Supreme Court, in the formal black of evening dress, and how much each of them would lose! Where there is beauty, strength or dignity, dress can heighten it; where all these are lacking, their absence is kept out of mind by raiment in itself worthy to be admired. If dress artificial has told for much in the history of human-kind, dress natural has told for yet more in the lesser world of plant and insect life. In some degree the tiny folk that reign in the air, like ourselves, are drawn by grace of form, by charm of colour; of elaborate display of their attractions moths, butterflies and beetles are just as fond as any belles of the ball-room. Now let us bear in mind that of all the creatures that share the earth with man, the one that stands next to him in intelligence is neither a biped nor a quadruped, but that king of the insect tribe, the ant, which can be a herdsman and warehouse-keeper, an engineer and builder, an explorer and a general. With all his varied powers the ant lacks a peculiarity in his costume which has denied him enlistment in a task of revolution in which creatures far his inferiors have been able to change the face of the earth. And the marvel of this peculiarity of garb which has meant so much, is that it consists in no detail of graceful outline, or beauty of tint, but solely in the minor matter of texture. The ant, warrior that he is, wears smooth and shining armour; the bee, the moth and the butterfly are clad in downy vesture, and simply because thus enabled to catch dust on their clothes these insects, as weavers of the web of life, have counted for immensely more than the ant with all his brains and character. To understand the mighty train of consequences set in motion by this mere shagginess of coat, let us remember that, like a human babe, every flowering plant has two parents. These two parents, though a county's breadth divide them, are wedded the instant that pollen from the anther of one of them meets the stigma of the other. Many flowers find their mates upon their own stem; but, as in the races of animals, too close intermarriage is hurtful, and union with a distant stock promotes both health and vigor. Hence the great gain which has come to plants by engaging the wind as their matchmaker—as every summer shows us in its pollen-laden air, the oaks, the pines, the cottonwoods, and a host of other plants commit to the breeze the winged atoms charged with the continuance of their kind. Nevertheless, long as the wind has been employed at this work, it has not yet learned to do it well; nearly all the pollen entrusted to it is wasted, and this while its production draws severely upon the strength of a plant. As good fortune will have it, a great many flowers close to their pollen yield an ample supply of nectar: a food esteemed delicious by the whole round of insects, winged and wingless. While ants might sip this nectar of ages without plants being any the better or the worse; a very different result has followed upon the visits of bees, wasps, and other hairy-coated callers. These, as they devour nectar, dust themselves with the pollen near by. Yellowed or whitened with this freightage, moth and butterfly, as they sail through the air, know not that they are publishing the banns of marriage between two blossoms acres or, it may be, miles apart. Yet so it is. Alighting on a new flower the insect rubs a pollen grain on a stigma ready to receive it, and lo! the rites of matrimony are solemnized then and there. Unwittingly the little visitor has wrought a task bigger with fate than many an act loudly trumpeted among the mightiest deeds of men! On the threshold of a Lady's Slipper a bee may often be detected in the act of entrance. In the Sage-flower he finds an anther of the stamen which, pivoted on its spring, dusts him even more effectually.



Bountifully to spread a table is much, but not enough, for without invitation how can hospitality be dispensed? To the feast of nectar the blossoms join their bidding; and those most conspicuously borne and massed, gayest of hue, richest in odor, secure most guests, and are therefore most likely to transmit to their kind their own excellences as hosts and entertainers. Thus all the glories of the blossoms have arisen in doing useful work; their beauty is not mere ornament, but the sign and token of duty well performed. Our opportunity to admire the radiancy and perfume of a jessamine or a pond-lily is due to the previous admiration of uncounted winged attendants. If a winsome maid adorns herself with a wreath from the garden, and carries a posy gathered at the brookside, it is for the second time that their charms are impressed into service; for the flowers' own ends of attraction all their scent and loveliness were called into being long before.

Let us put flowers of the blue flag beside those of the maple, and we shall have a fair contrast between the brilliancy of blossoms whose marrier has been an insect, and the dinginess of flowers indebted to the services of the wind. Can it be that both kinds of flowers are descended from forms resembling each other in want of grace and colour? Such, indeed, is the truth. But how, as the generations of the flowers succeeded one another, did differences so striking come about? In our rambles afield let us seek a clue to the mystery. It is late in springtime, and near the border of a bit of swamp we notice a clump of violets: they are pale of hue, and every stalk of them rises to an almost weedy height.



Twenty paces away, on a knoll of dry ground, we find more violets, but these are in much deeper tints of azure and yellow, while their stalks are scarcely more than half as tall as their brethren near the swamp. Six weeks pass by. This time we walk to a wood-lot close to a brimming pond. At its edge are more than a score wild-rose bushes. On the very first of them we see that some of the blossoms are a light pink, others a pink so deep as to seem dashed with vivid red. And while a flower here and there is decidedly larger and more vigorous than its fellows, a few of the blossoms are undersized and puny: the tide of life flows high and merrily in a fortunate rose or two, it seems to ebb and falter by the time it reaches one or two of their unhappy mates. As we search bush after bush we are at last repaid for sundry scratches from their thorns by securing a double rose, a "sport," as the gardener would call it. And in the broad meadow between us and home we well know that for the quest we can have not only four-leaved clovers, but perchance a handful of five and six-leaved prizes. The secret is out. Flowers and leaves are not cast like bullets in rigid moulds, but differ from their parents much as children do. Usually the difference is slight, at times it is as marked as in our double rose. Whenever the change in a flower is for the worse, as in the sickly violets and roses we have observed, that particular change ends there—with death. But when the change makes a healthy flower a little more attractive to its insect ministers, it will naturally be chosen by them for service, and these choosings, kept up year after year, and century upon century, have at last accomplished much the same result as if the moth, the bee, and the rest of them had been given power to create blossoms of the most welcome forms, the most alluring tints, the most bewitching perfumes.

In farther jaunts afield we shall discover yet more. It is May, and a heavy rainstorm has caused the petals of a trillium to forget themselves and return to their primitive hue of leafy green. A month later we come upon a buttercup, one of whose sepals has grown out as a small but perfect leaf. Later still in summer we find a rose in the same surprising case, while not far off is a columbine bearing pollen on its spurs instead of its anthers. What family tie is betrayed in all this? No other than that sepals, petals, anthers and pistils are but leaves in disguise, and that we have detected nature returning to the form from which ages ago she began to transmute the parts of flowers in all their teeming diversity. The leaf is the parent not only of all these but of delicate tendrils, which save a vine the cost of building a stem stout enough to lift it to open air and sunshine. However thoroughly, or however long, a habit may be impressed upon a part of a plant, it may on occasion relapse into a habit older still, resume a shape all but forgotten, and thus tell a story of its past that otherwise might remain forever unsuspected. Thus it is with the somewhat rare "sport" that gives us a morning glory or a harebell in its primitive form of unjoined petals. The bell form of these and similar flowers has established itself by being much more effective than the original shape in dusting insect servitors with pollen. Not only the forms of flowers but their massing has been determined by insect preferences; a wide profusion of blossoms grow in spikes, umbels, racemes and other clusters, all economizing the time of winged allies, and attracting their attention from afar as scattered blossoms would fail to do. Besides this massing, we have union more intimate still as in the dandelion, the sun-flower and the marigold. These and their fellow composites each seem an individual; a penknife discloses each of them to be an aggregate of blossoms. So gainful has this kind of co-operation proved that composites are now dominant among plants in every quarter of the globe. As to how composites grew before they learned that union is strength, a hint is dropped in the "sport" of the daisy known as "the hen and chickens," where perhaps as many as a dozen florets, each on a stalk of its own, ray out from a mother flower.

While for the most part insects have been mere choosers from among various styles of architecture set before them by plants, they have sometimes risen to the dignity of builders on their own account, and without ever knowing it. The buttress of the larkspur has sprung forth in response to the pressure of one bee's weight after another, and many a like structure has had the very same origin,—or shall we say, provocation? In these and in other examples unnumbered, culminating in the marvellous orchids and their ministers, there has come about the closest adaptation of flower-shape to insect-form, the one now clearly the counterpart of the other.

We must not forget that the hospitality of a flower is after all the hospitality of an inn-keeper who earns and requires payment. Vexed as flowers are apt to be by intruders that consume their stores without requital, no wonder that they present so ample an array of repulsion and defence. Best of all is such a resource as that of the red clover, which hides its honey at the bottom of a tube so deep that only a friendly bumblebee can sip it. Less effective, but well worth a moment's examination, are the methods by which leaves are opposed as fences for the discouragement of thieves. Here, in a Bellwort, is a perfoliate leaf that encircles the stem upon which it grows; and there in a Honeysuckle is a connate leaf on much the same plan, formed of two leaves, stiff and strong, soldered at their bases. Sometimes the pillager meets prickles that sting him, as in the roses and briers; and if he is a little fellow he is sure to regard him with intense disgust, a bristly guard of wiry hair—hence the commonness of that kind of fortification. Against enemies of larger growth a tree or shrub will often aim sharp thorns—another piece of masquerade, for thorns are but branches checked in growth, and frowning with a barb in token of disappointment at not being able to smile in a blossom. In every jot and tittle of barb and prickle, of the glossiness which disheartens or the gumminess which ensnares, we may be sure that equally with all the lures of hue, form and scent, nothing, however trifling it may seem, is as we find it, except through usefulness long tested and approved. In flowers, much that at first glance looks like idle decoration, on closer scrutiny reveals itself as service in disguise. In penetrating these disguises and many more of other phases, the student of flowers delights to busy himself. He loves, too, to detect the cousinship of plants through all the change of dress and habit due to their rearing under widely different skies and nurture, to their being surrounded by strangely contrasted foes and friends. Often he can link two plants together only by going into partnership with a student of the rocks, by turning back the records of the earth until he comes upon a flower long extinct, a plant which ages ago found the struggle for life too severe for it. He ever takes care to observe his flowers accurately and fully, but chiefly that he may rise from observation to explanation, from bare facts to their causes, from declaring What, to understanding, Whence and How.

One of the stock resources of novelists, now somewhat out of date, was the inn-keeper who beamed in welcome of his guest, grasped his hand in gladness, and loaded a table for him in tempting array, and all with intent that later in the day (or night) he might the more securely plunge a dagger into his victim's heart—if, indeed, he had not already improved an opportunity to offer to that victim's lips a poisoned cup. This imagined treachery might well have been suggested by the behaviour of certain alluring plants that so far from repelling thieves, or discouraging pillagers, open their arms to all comers—with purpose of the deadliest. Of these betrayers the chief is the round-leaved sun-dew, which plies its nefarious vocation all the way from Labrador to Florida. Its favourite site is a peat-bog or a bit of swampy lowland, where in July and August we can see its pretty little white blossoms beckoning to wayfaring flies and moths their token of good cheer! Circling the flower-stalk, in rosette fashion, are a dozen or more round leaves, each of them wearing scores of glands, very like little pins, a drop of gum glistening on each and every pin by way of head. This appetizing gum is no other than a fatal stick-fast, the raying pins closing in its aid the more certainly to secure a hapless prisoner. Soon his prison-house becomes a stomach for his absorption. Its duty of digestion done, the leaf in all seeming guilessness once more expands itself for the enticement of a dupe. To see how much the sun-dew must depend upon its meal of insects we have only to pull it up from the ground. A touch suffices—it has just root enough to drink by; the soil in which it makes, and perhaps has been obliged to make, its home has nothing else but drink to give it.

Less accomplished in its task of assassination is the common butterwort to be found on wet rocks in scattered districts of Canada and the States adjoining Canada. Surrounding its pretty violet flowers, of funnel shape, are gummy leaves which close upon their all too trusting guests, but with less expertness than the sun-dew's. The butterwort is but a 'prentice hand in the art of murder, and its intended victims often manage to get away from it. Built on a very different model is the bladderwort, busy in stagnant ponds near the sea coast from Nova Scotia to Texas. Its little white spongy bladders, about a tenth of an inch across, encircle the flowering stem by scores. From each bladder a bunch of twelve or fifteen hairy prongs protrude, giving the structure no slight resemblance to an insect form. These prongs hide a valve which, as many an unhappy little swimmer can attest, opens inward easily enough, but opens outward never. As in the case of its cousinry a-land, the bladderwort at its leisure dines upon its prey.



In marshy places near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, in the vicinity of Wilmington, North Carolina, grows the Venus' fly-trap, most wonderful of all the death-dealers of vegetation. Like much else in nature's handiwork this plant might well have given inventors a hint worth taking. The hairy fringes of its leaves are as responsive to a touch from moth or fly as the sensitive plant itself. And he must be either a very small or a particularly sturdy little captive that can escape through the sharp opposed teeth of its formidable snare. It is one of the unexplained puzzles of plant life that the Venus' fly-trap, so marvellous in its ingenuity, should not only be confined to a single district, but should seem to be losing its hold of even that small kingdom. Of still another type is the pitcher plant, or side-saddle flower, which flaunts its deep purple petals in June in many a peat-bog from Canada southward to Louisiana and Florida. Its leaves develop themselves into lidded cups, half-filled with sweetish juice, which first lures a fly or ant, then makes him tipsy, and then despatches him. The broth resulting is both meat and drink to the plant, serving as a store and reservoir against times of drought and scarcity.



Now the question is, How came about this strange and somewhat horrid means of livelihood? How did plants of so diverse families turn the tables on the insect world, and learn to eat instead of being themselves devoured? A beginner in the builder's art finds it much more gainful to examine the masonry of foundations, the rearing of walls, the placing of girders and joists, the springing of arches and buttresses, than to look at a cathedral, a courthouse, or a bank, finished and in service. In like manner a student of insect-eating plants tries to find their leaves in the making, in all the various stages which bridge their common forms with the shapes they assume when fully armed and busy. Availing himself of the relapses into old habits which plants occasionally exhibit under cultivation, Mr. Dickson has taught us much regarding the way the pitcher plant of Australia, the Cephalotus, has come to be what it is. He has arranged in a connected series all the forms of its leaf from that of a normal leaf with a mere dimple in it, to the deeply pouched and lidded pitcher ready for deceitful hospitalities. And similar transformations have without doubt taken place in the pitcher plants of America. Observers in the Cape of Good Hope have noted two plants Roridula dentata and Biblys gigantea, which are evidently following in the footsteps of the sundews, and may be expected in the fulness of years to be their equal partners in crime. But why need we wander so far as South Africa to find the germs of this strange rapacity when we can see at home a full dozen species of catch-fly, sedums, primulas, and geraniums pouring out glutinous juices in which insects are entangled? Let stress of hunger, long continued, force any of these to turn its attention to the dietary thus proffered, and how soon might not the plant find in felony the sustenance refused to honest toil?

But after all the plants that have meat for dinner are only a few. The greater part of the vegetable kingdom draws its supplies from the air and the soil. Those plants, and they are many, that derive their chief nourishment from the atmosphere have a decidedly thin diet. Which of us would thrive on milk at the rate of a pint to five hogsheads of water? Such is the proportion in which air contains carbonic acid gas, the main source of strength for many thousands of trees, shrubs, and other plants. No wonder that they array themselves in so broad an expanse of leafage. An elm with a spread of seventy feet is swaying in the summer breeze at least five acres of foliage as its lungs and stomach. Beyond the shade of elms and maples let us stroll past yonder stretch of pasture and we shall notice how the grass in patches here and there deepens into green of the richest—a plain token of moisture in the hollows—a blessing indeed in this dry weather. In the far West and Northwest the buffalo grass has often to contend with drought for months together, so that it has learned to strike deep in quest of water to quench its thirst. It is a by-word among the ranchmen that the roots go clear through the earth and are clinched as they sprout from the ground in China. Joking apart, they have been found sixty-eight feet below the surface of the prairie, and often in especially dry seasons cattle would perish were not these faithful little well-diggers and pumpers constantly at work for them. In the river valleys of Arizona although the air is dry the subsoil water is near the surface of the ground. Here flourishes the mesquit tree, Prosopis juliflora, with a tale to tell well worth knowing. When a mesquit seems stunted, it is because its strength is withdrawn for the task of delving to find water; where a tree grows tall with goodly branches, it betokens success in reaching moisture close at hand. Thus in shrewdly reading the landscape a prospector can choose the spot where with least trouble he can sink his well. And plants discover provender in the soil as well as drink. Nearer home than Arizona we have only to dislodge a beach pea from the ground to see how far in search of food its roots have dug amid barren stones and pebbles. Often one finds a plant hardly a foot high with roots extending eight feet from its stem.

And beyond the beaches where the beach peas dig so diligently are the seaweeds—with a talent for picking and choosing all their own. Dr. Julius Sachs, a leading German botanist, believes that the parts of plants owe their form, as crystals do, to their peculiarities of substance; that just as salt crystallizes in one shape and sugar in another, so a seaweed or a tulip is moulded by the character of its juices. Something certainly of the crystal's faculty for picking out particles akin to itself, and building with them, is shown by the kelp which attracts from the ocean both iodine and bromine—often dissolved though they are in a million times their bulk of sea water. This trait of choosing this or that dish from the feast afforded by sea or soil or air is not peculiar to the seaweeds; every plant displays it. Beech trees love to grow on limestone and thus declare to the explorer the limestone ridge he seeks. In the Horn silver mine, of Utah, the zinc mingled with the silver ore is betrayed by the abundance of the zinc violet, a delicate and beautiful cousin of the pansy. In Germany this little flower is admittedly a signal of zinc in the earth, and zinc is found in its juices. The late Mr. William Dorn, of South Carolina, had faith in a bush, of unrecorded name, as betokening gold-bearing veins beneath it. That his faith was not without foundation is proved by the large fortune he won as a gold miner in the Blue Ridge country—his guide the bush aforesaid. Mr. Rossiter W. Raymond, the eminent mining engineer of New York, has given some attention to this matter of "indicative plants." He is of the opinion that its unwritten lore among practical miners, prospectors, hunters, and Indians is well worth sifting. Their observations, often faulty, may occasionally be sound and valuable enough richly to repay the trouble of separating truth from error. When we see how important as signs of water many plants can be, why may we not find other plants denoting the minerals which they especially relish as food or condiment?

Of more account than gold or silver are the harvests of wheat and corn that ripen in our fields. There the special appetites of plants have much more than merely curious interest for the farmer. He knows full well that his land is but a larder which serves him best when not part but all its stores are in demand. Hence his crop "rotation," his succession of wheat to clover, of grass to both. Were he to grow barley every year he would soon find his soil bared of all the food that barley asks, while fare for peas or clover stood scarcely broached. If he insists on planting barley always, then he must perforce restore to the land the food for barley constantly withdrawn.



A plant may diligently find food and drink, pour forth delicious nectar, array itself with flowers as gayly as it can, and still behold its work unfinished. Its seed may be produced in plenty, and although as far as that goes it is well, it is not enough. Of what avail is all this seed if it falls as it ripens upon soil already overcrowded with its kind? Hence the vigorous emigration policy to be observed in plants of every name. Hence the fluffy sails set to catch the passing breeze by the dandelion, the thistle and by many more, including the southern plant of snowy wealth whose wings are cotton. With the same intent of seeking new fields are the hooks of the burdock, the unicorn plant, and the bur-parsley which impress as carriers the sheep and cattle upon a thousand hills. The Touch-me-not and the herb Robert adopt a different plan, and convert their seed-cases into pistols for the firing of seeds at as wide range as twenty feet or more. The maple, the ash, the hornbeam, the elm and the birch have yet another method of escape from the home acre. Their seeds are winged, and torn off in a gale are frequently borne two hundred yards away. And stronger wings than these are plied in the cherry tree's service. The birds bide the time when a blush upon the fruit betrays its ripeness. Then the cherries are greedily devoured, and their seed, preserved from digestion in their stony cases are borne over hill, dale, and river to some islet or brookside where a sprouting cherry plant will be free from the stifling rivalries suffered by its parent. Yoked in harness with sheep, ox, and bird as planter is yonder nimble squirrel. We need not begrudge him the store of nuts he hides. He will forget some of them, he will be prevented by fright or frost from nibbling yet more, and so without intending it he will ensure for others and himself a sure succession of acorns and butternuts.

Very singular are the seeds that have come to resemble beetles; among these may be mentioned the seeds of the castor-oil plant and of the Iatropha. The pod of the Biserrula looks like a worm, and a worm half-coiled might well have served as a model for the mimicry of the Scorpiurus vermiculata. All these are much more likely to enlist the services of birds than if their resemblances to insects were less striking.

Nature elsewhere rich in hints to the gardener and the farmer is not silent here. A lesson plainly taught in all this apparatus for the dispersal of seeds is that the more various the planting the fuller the harvest. Now that from the wheat fields comes a cry of disappearing gains, it is time to heed the story told in the unbroken prairie that diversity in sowing means wealth in reaping.

In a field of growing flax we can find—somewhat oftener than the farmer likes—a curious tribe of plants, the dodders. Their stems are thin and wiry, and their small white flowers, globular in shape, make the azure blossoms of the flax all the lovelier by contrast. As their cousins the morning glories are to this day, the dodders in their first estate were true climbers. Even now they begin life in an honest kind of way with roots of their own that go forth as roots should, seeking food where it is to be found in the soil. But if we pull up one of these little club-shaped roots we shall see that it has gone to work feebly and doubtfully; it seems to have a skulking expectation of dinner without having to dig and delve for it in the rough dirty ground. Nor is this expectation unfounded. Watch the stem of a sister dodder as it rises from the earth day by day, and it will be observed to clasp a stalk of flax very tightly; so tightly that its suckers will absorb the juices of its unhappy host. When, so very easily, it can regale itself with food ready to hand why should it take the trouble to drudge for a living?

Like many another pauper demoralized by being fed in idleness, the plant now abandons honest toil, its roots from lack of exercise wither away, and for good and all it ceases to claim any independence whatever. Indeed, so deep is the dodder's degradation that if it cannot find a stem of flax, or hop, or other plant whereon to climb and thrive, it will simply shrivel and die rather than resume habits of industry so long renounced as to be at last forgotten.

Like the lowly dodder the mistletoe is a climber that has discovered large opportunities of theft in ascending the stem of a supporting plant. On this continent the mistletoe scales a wide variety of trees and shrubs, preferring poplars and apple trees, where these are to be had. Its extremely slender stem, its meagre leaves, its small flowers, greenish and leathery, are all eloquent as to the loss of strength and beauty inevitable to a parasite. Rising as this singular plant does out of the branches of another with a distinct life all its own, it is no other than a natural graft, and it is very probable that from the hint it so unmistakably gives the first gardeners were not slow to adopt grafts artificial—among the resources which have most enriched and diversified both flowers and fruits. The dodders and mistletoes rob juices from the stem and branches of their unfortunate hosts; more numerous still are the unbidden guests that fasten themselves upon the roots of their prey. The broom-rape, a comparatively recent immigrant from Europe, lays hold of the roots of thyme in preference to other place of entertainment; the Yellow Rattle, the Lousewort, and many more attach themselves to the roots of grasses—frequently with a serious curtailment of crop.

Yet in this very department of hers Nature has for ages hidden away what has been disclosed within twenty years as one of her least suspected marvels. It is no other than that certain parasites of field and meadow so far from being hurtful, are well worth cultivating for the good they do. For a long time the men who devoted themselves to the study of peas, beans, clovers, and other plants of the pulse family, were confronted with a riddle they could not solve. These plants all manage to enrich themselves with compounds of nitrogen, which make them particularly valuable as food, and these compounds often exist in a degree far exceeding the rate at which their nitrogen comes out of the soil. And this while they have no direct means of seizing upon the nitrogen contained in its great reservoir—the atmosphere. Upon certain roots of beans and peas it was noted that there were little round excrescences about the size of a small pin's head. These excrescences on examination with a microscope proved to be swarming with bacteria of minute dimensions. Further investigation abundantly showed that these little guests paid a handsome price for their board and lodging—while they subsisted in part on the juices of their host they passed into the bean or pea certain valuable compounds of nitrogen which they built from common air. At the Columbian Exposition, of 1893, one of the striking exhibits in the Agricultural Building set this forth in detail. Vials were shown containing these tiny subterranean aids to the farmer, and large photographs showed in natural size the vast increase of crop due to the farmer's taking bacteria into partnership. To-day these little organisms are cultivated of set purpose, and quest is being made for similar bacteria suitable to be harnessed in producing wheat, corn, and other harvests.

These are times when men of science are discontented with mere observation. They wish to pass from watching things as nature presents them to putting them into relations wholly new. In 1866 DeBary, a close observer of lichens, felt confident that a lichen was not the simple growth it seems, but a combination of fungus and algae. This opinion, so much opposed to honoured tradition, was scouted, but not for long. Before many months had passed Stahl took known algae, and upon them sowed a known fungus, the result was a known lichen! The fungus turns out to be no other than a slave-driver that captures algae in colonies and makes them work for him. He is, however, a slave-driver of an intelligent sort; his captives thrive under his mastery, and increase more rapidly for the healthy exercise he insists that they shall take.

It is an afternoon in August and the sultry air compels us to take shelter in a grove of swaying maples. Beneath their shade every square yard of ground bears a score of infant trees, very few of them as much as a foot in stature. How vain their expectation of one day enjoying an ample spread of branch and root, of rising to the free sunshine of upper air! The scene, with its quivering rounds of sunlight, seems peace itself, but the seeming is only a mask for war as unrelenting as that of weaponed armies. For every ray of the sunbeam, for every atom of food, for every inch of standing room, there is deadly rivalry. To begin the fight is vastly easier than to maintain it, and not one in a hundred of these bantlings will ever know maturity. We have only to do what Darwin did—count the plants that throng a foot of sod in spring, count them again in summer, and at the summer's end, to find how great the inexorable carnage in this unseen combat, how few its survivors. So hard here is the fight for a foothold, for daily bread, that the playfulness inborn in every healthy plant can peep out but timidly and seldom. But when strife is exchanged for peace, when a plant is once safely sheltered behind a garden fence, then the struggles of the battlefield give place to the diversions of the garrison—diversions not infrequently hilarious enough. Now food abounds and superabounds; henceforth neither drought nor deluge can work their evil will; insect foes, as well as may be, are kept at bay; there is room in plenty instead of dismal overcrowding. The grateful plant repays the care bestowed upon it by bursting into a sportiveness unsuspected, and indeed impossible, amidst the alarms and frays incessant in the wilderness. It departs from parental habits in most astonishing fashion, puts forth blossoms of fresh grace of form, of new dyes, of doubled magnitude. The gardener's opportunity has come. He can seize upon such of these "sports" as he chooses and make them the confirmed habits of his wards. Take a stroll through his parterres and greenhouses, where side by side he shows you pansies of myriad tints and the modest little wild violets of kindred to the pansies' ancestral stock. Let him contrast for you roses, asters, tuberous begonias, hollyhocks, dahlias, pelargoniums, before cultivation and since. Were wild flowers clay, were the gardener both painter and sculptor, he could not have wrought marvels more glorious than these. In a few years the brethren of his guild have brought about a revolution for which, if possible at all to her, nature in the open fields would ask long centuries. And the gardener's experiments with these strange children of his have all the charm of surprise. No passive chooser is he of "sports" of promise, but an active matchmaker between flowers often brought together from realms as far apart as France and China. Sometimes his experiment is an instant success. Mr. William Paul, a famous creator of splendid flowers, tells us that at a time when climbing roses were either white or yellow, he thought he would like to produce one of bright dark colour. Accordingly he mated the Rose Athelin, of vivid crimson, with Russelliana, a hardy climber, and lo, the flower he had imagined and longed for stood revealed! But this hitting the mark at the first shot is uncommon good fortune with the gardener. No experience with primrose or chrysanthemum is long and varied enough to tell him how the crossing of two different stocks will issue. A rose which season after season opposes only indifference to all his pains may be secretly gathering strength for a bound beyond its ancestral paths which will carry it much farther than his hopes, or, perhaps, his wishes.

Most flowers are admired for their own sweet sake, but who thinks less of an apple or cherry blossom because it bears in its beauty the promise of delicious fruit? Put a red Astrachan beside a sorry crab, a Bartlett pear next a tough, diminutive wild pear such as it is descended from, an ear of milky corn in contrast with an ear one-fourth its size, each grain of which, small and dry, is wrapped in a sheath by itself; and rejoice that fruits and grains as well as flowers can learn new lessons and remember them. At Concord, Massachusetts, in an honoured old age, dwells Mr. Ephraim W. Bull. In his garden he delights to show the mother vine of the Concord grape which he developed from a native wild grape planted as long ago as 1843. Another "sport" of great value was the nectarine, which was seized upon as it made its appearance on a peach bough. Throughout America are scattered experiment stations, part of whose business it is to provoke fresh varieties of wheat, or corn, or other useful plant, and make permanent such of them as show special richness of yield; earliness in ripening; stoutness of resistance to Jack Frost, or blight, or insect pests. Suppose that dire disaster swept from off the earth every cereal used as food. Professor Goodale, Professor Asa Gray's successor at Harvard University, has so much confidence in the experiment stations of America that he deems them well able to repair the loss we have imagined; within fifty years, he thinks, from plants now uncultivated the task could be accomplished. Among the men who have best served the world by hastening nature's steps in the improvement of flowers and fruits, stands Mr. Vilmorin, of Paris. He it was who in creating the sugar beet laid the foundation for one of the chief industries of our time. One of his rules is to select at first not the plant which varies most in the direction he wishes, but the plant that varies most in any direction whatever. From it, from the instability of its very fibres, its utter forgetfulness of ancestral traditions, he finds it easiest in the long run to obtain and to establish the character he seeks of sweetness, or size, or colour.

Of flowering plants there are about 110,000, of these the farmer and the gardener between them have scarcely tamed and trained 1,000. What new riches, therefore, may we not expect from the culture of the future? Already in certain northern flower-pots the trillium, the bloodroot, the dog's-tooth violet, and the celandine are abloom in May; as June advances, the wild violet, the milkweed, the wild lily-of-the-valley, unfold their petals; later in summer the dog-rose displays its charms and breathes its perfume. All respond kindly to care, and were there more of this hospitality, were the wild roses which the botanist calls blanda and lucida, were the cardinal flowers, the May flowers, and many more of the treasures of glen and meadow, made welcome with thoughtful study of their wants and habits, much would be done to extend the wealth of our gardens. Let a hepatica be plucked from its home in a rocky crevice where one marvels how it ever contrived to root itself and find subsistence. Transplant it to good soil, give it a little care—it asks none—and it will thrive as it never throve before; proving once again that plants do not grow where they like, but where they can. The Russian columbine rewards its cultivator with a wealth of blossoms that plainly say how much it rejoices in his nurture of it, in its escape from the frost and tempest that have assailed it for so many generations.

But here we must be content to take a leaf out of nature's book, and look for small results unless our experiments are broadly planned. It is in great nurseries and gardens, not in little door-yards that "sports" are likely to arise, and to meet the skill which can confirm them as new varieties.

Japan has much to teach us with regard to flowers: nowhere else on earth are they so sedulously cultivated, or so faithfully studied in all their changeful beauty. Perhaps the most striking revelation of the Japanese gardener is his treatment of flowering shrubs and flowering trees disposed in masses. Happy the visitors to Tokio who sees in springtime the cherry blossoms ready to lend their witchery to the Empress's reception! Much is done to extend the reign of beauty in a garden when it is fitly bordered with berry-bearers. Rows of mountain ash, snow-berry, and hawthorn trees give colour just when colour is most effective, at the time when most flowers are past and gone.

In the practical bit of ground where the kitchen garden meets the flowers, Japan has long since enlarged its bill of fare with the tuber of a cousin of our common hedge nettle, with the roots of the large burdock, commoner still. In Florida, the calla lily has use as well as beauty; it is cultivated for its potato-like tubers.

Much as the study of flowers heightens our interest in them, their first, their chief enduring charm consists in their simple beauty—their infinitely varied grace of form, their exhaustless wealth of changeful tints. Off we go with delight from desk and book to a breezy field, a wimpling brook, a quiet pond in woodland shade. A dozen rambles from May to October will show us all the floral procession, which, beginning with the trilliums and the violets, ends at the approach of frost with the golden-rod and aster. But who ever formed an engaging acquaintance without wishing it might become a close friendship? Never yet did the observant culler of bloodroot and columbine rest satisfied with merely knowing their names, and how can more be known unless flowers are set up in a portrait gallery of their own for the leisurely study of their lineaments and lineage?

A word then as to the best way to gather wild flowers. A case for them in the form of a round tube, closed at the ends, with a hinged cover, can be made by a tinsmith at small cost. Its dimensions should be about thirty inches in length by five inches in diameter, with a strap attached to carry it by. At still less expense a frame can be made, or bought, formed of two boards, one-eighth of an inch thick, twenty-four inches long and eighteen inches broad, with two thin battens fastened across them to prevent warping. A quire of soft brown paper, newspaper will do, and a strap to hold all together, complete the outfit.

Our gathered treasures at home, we may wish to deck a table or a mantel with a few of them. The lives of impressed blossoms can be, much prolonged by exercising a little care. Punch holes in a round of cardboard and put the stalks through these holes before placing the flowers in a vase. This prevents the stalks touching each other, and so decaying before their time. A little charcoal in the water tends to keep it pure; the water should be changed daily.

A flower will fade at last be it tended ever so carefully. If we wish to preserve it dried we can best do so as soon as we bring it home, by placing it between sheets of absorbent paper (newspaper will do) well weighted down, the paper to be renewed if the plants are succulent and if there is any risk of mildew. But a dried plant after all is only a mummy. Its colours are gone; its form bruised and crumpled, gives only a faint suggestion of it as it lived and breathed. Other and more pleasant reminders of our summer rambles can be ours. With a camera of fair size it is easy to take pictures of flowers at their best; these pictures can be coloured in their natural tints with happy effect. In this art Mrs. Cornelius Van Brunt, of New York, has attained extraordinary success. Or, instead of the camera, why not at first invoke the brush and colour-box? Only a little skill in handling them is enough for a beginning. Practice soon increases deftness in this art as in every other, and in a few short weeks floral portraits are painted with a truth to nature denied the unaided pencil. For what flower, however meek and lowly, could ever tell its story in plain black and white?

The amateur painter of flowers learns a good many things by the way; at the very outset, that drawing accurate and clear must be the groundwork of any painting worthy the name. Both in the use of pencil and brush there must be a degree of painstaking observation, wholesome as a discipline and delightful in its harvests. How many of us, unused to the task of careful observation, can tell the number of the musk-mallow's petals, or mark on paper the depth of fringe on a gentian, or match from a series of dyed silks the hues of a common buttercup? Drawing and painting sharpen the eye, and make the fingers its trained and ready servants. From the very beginning of one's task in limning bud and blossom, we see them richer in grace and loveliness than ever before. When wild flowers are sketched as they grow it is often easy to give them a new interest by adding the portraits of their insect servitors. Amateurs who are so fortunate as to visit the West Indies have an opportunity to paint the wonderful blossoms of the Marcgravia, whose minister, a humming bird, quivers above it like a bit of rainbow loosened from the sky.

Early in the history of art the wild flowers lent their aid to decoration. The acanthus which gave its leaves to crest the capital of the Corinthian column, the roses conventionalized in the rich fabrics of ancient Persia, until they have been thought sheer inventions of the weaver, are among the first items of an indebtedness which has steadily grown in volume until to-day, when the designers who find their inspiration in the flowers are a vast and increasing host. In a modern mansion of the best type the outer walls are enriched with the leonine beauty of the sun-flower; within, the mosaic floors, the silk, and paper hangings, repeat themes suggested by the vine, the wild clematis and the Mayflower. The stained glass windows from New York, where their manufacture excels that of any other city in the world, are exquisite with boldly treated lilies, poppies, and columbines. In the drawing-room are embroideries designed by two young women of Salem, Massachusetts, who have established a thriving industry in transferring the glow of wild flowers to the adornment of noble houses such as this. As one goes from studio to studio, it is cheering to find so many men and women busy at work which is more joyful than play,—which in many cases first taken up as a recreation disclosed a vein of genuine talent and so pointed to a career more delightful than any other,—because it chimes in with the love of beauty and the power of giving it worthy expression.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Unable to verify "partnery" nor "tucu-tucu", but they have been left as in the original.

The word "sylvain" has been verified as a valid word, and therefore it has been left as in the original.

THE END