164 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



and licorice are among the ingredients which are depended 

 upon to raise the cheap cigar to an equahty with its 25-cent 

 relative. To give a bouquet to the product, vanilla or its 

 double, coumarin, is commonly used. According to a writer 

 in Torreya the vanilla leaf {Trilsia ordoratissiuia) , and per- 

 haps T. paniculata, is also used to flavor cigars. The basal 

 leaves of this plant, which contain coumarin, are gathered in 

 parts of Georgia and sent to market in large quantities. In 

 some years possibly a hundred tons of the leaves are gather- 

 ed in three counties in the State mentioned. 



Man-of-The earth. — Several species of the Convol- 

 vulaceae are known to produce enlarged roots, our cultivated 

 sweet potato being a good example. The palm for the larg- 

 est root is awarded to Ipomoea pandurata whose reputation 

 in this respect is reflected in the common names of "man- 

 root" and "man-of-the-earth." The roots are popularly as- 

 sumed to attain the size of a man's body but nobody seems 

 to have seen a root of this size. O. P. Medsger, who recent- 

 ly attempted to dig up a plant, reports in Torreya that it ex- 

 tended more than three feet into the soil and weighed more 

 than fifteen pounds. He repc^rts, also, that the bush morning- 

 glorv of the West has a still larger root and that roots of 

 /. Jalapa of the Southern States reaches a weight of forty 

 pounds. In parts of the Middle West the man-of-the-earth 

 is fairly abundant often growing in thickets and climbing the 

 surrounding vegetation where it opens its hundreds of large 

 cream-colored, purple-throated corollas to the gaze of the 

 traveler. 



Feather Hyacinth. — In old-fashioned gardens one 

 occasionally comes upon a curious plant with hyacinth-like 

 leaves and a spike of very fine-cut slender filaments which 

 produce the effect of a purple plume nearly a foot long. It 

 is impossible to trace this remarkable specimen by means of 



