280 The Plant World. 



mere translations of the scientific names of the plants, which at 

 best is poor. All this justifies the writer in making the above 

 criticism of a book which might have been made very much 

 more useful. 



NOTES AND COMMENT. 

 Dr. VV. A. Cannon in a personal letter sa3's in regard to cer- 

 tain things noted in his recent trip through England: "There 

 are two points which I should have accentuated in the paper. 

 One of these is the abundance of Cedars of Lebanon, the prob- 

 able reason being their introduction by the crusaders many cen- 

 turies ago. I found them pretty much throughout England. 

 The other is in reference to the value of Stonehenge as an indica- 

 tion that the plains of Salisbury were not forested when their 

 prehistoric builders lived there and when the Roman soldiers 

 had their camp at and around 'Old Sarum.' This did not strike 

 me as being of special interest when I wrote it, but now it does." 



Readers of the Plant World who have been impressed with 

 the luxuriant growth of pepper trees in the southwestern United 

 States will be interested in an extract from the Los Angeles 

 Herald: "After having w ithstood the blasts of over half a hun- 

 dred winters two pioneer pepper trees of the San Bernardino 

 valley are being felled because they have become so infirm that 

 they may be uprooten at any time. The two trees were the first 

 of the pepper variety to be planted in the valley and were the 

 first to be brought to California. They were imported from the 

 Sandwich Islands and planted in San Bernardino in 1856. The 

 children of three generations have played beneath the stal,wart 

 and stately old trees, but public safety finally demanded that the 

 pioneers of all pepper trees in the valley be felled." 



There is a refreshing naivete in some of the passages of 

 Metchnikoff 's interesting book on the Prolongation of Life. After 

 discussing at some length the general subject of natural death 

 among plants and concluding that various yeasts and microbes 

 which perish in an excess of their own secretions are to be thought 

 of as victims of auto-intoxication, he raises the question whether 



