THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 91 



The Peanut Abroad. — According to the Gardening 

 World the British are beginning to take to peanuts for 

 which they appear to have coined the new name monkej' 

 nut. How they have been able to run their country fairs 

 for so long without the, to us, indispensable peanut, is a 

 mystery. 



A British Peculiarity. — Never by an^^ chance do our 

 British cousins speak of beets. With them it is always 

 beet-roots. Yet they never think of saying parsnip-root 

 or carrot-root for exactly the same structures in the car^ 

 rot and parsnip. It is amusing to us, but they doubtless 

 find our uses of other words equall3^ amusing. 



The Hawthorns. — According to a writer in Garden- 

 ing nearly five hundred species of hawthorn (Cratfegus) 

 have now been described from America. Of these. Prof. 

 •Sargent has described about one hundred and sevent3'-five 

 while C. D. Beadle and W, W. Ashe each have nearly one 

 hundred and fifty to their credit. Fortunately for botan- 

 ists there is nothing to oblige them to accept these forms 

 at the valuation of their describers. 



The Adder's-tongues. — Is it wild or cultivated ? is a 

 question one often hears asked about some strange and 

 handsome flower, as if all species are not wild somewhere. 

 In the popular mind, however, cultivated plants are those 

 that come from a different locality than the one in w^hich 

 they are grown as garden flowers, and far too often this 

 distinction is made the basis of a division that excludes 

 manvafine native species. The adder's-tongues ( Erythro 

 nium) would be called cultivated flowers in the Old World, 

 but scarceh' placed in the same category in the New, and 

 thus it happens that these handsome plants are usually 

 absent from American gardens. The British are more 

 appreciative of their Ijeauty and a recent number of the 

 Gardenings World recommends no less than twelve species 

 for cultivation. All of thcvse with the exceptic^n of the 

 single European species ( E. dens-canis) are native Ameri- 

 cans. E.dens-canis was cultivated as early as 1596. Our 

 common yellow species {E. Americanum) was soon intro- 



