I Editorieil. I 



We cannot refrain from congratulating our readers 

 and felicitating ourselves upon the amount and character 

 of the matter now being received for publication by this 

 magazine. At the beginning it was not an easy task to 

 secure an adequate amount of original matter, for the 

 average young writer, and many an older- one, too, prone 

 to drift into the categorical style and make .his articles 

 little more than mere lists of species. Many such we were 

 obliged to return to the writers, but our persistence has at 

 last set the tide in the right direction. We hope, however, 

 that any reader who has been thinking ot sending us a 

 note or a longer article will not hesitate under the impres- 

 sion that we have more contributions than w^e can use. 

 One of the greatest inducements to further enlarging this 

 journal w^ould be the fact that we had more good articles 



than we could print in the present size. 



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It is probable that many of our readers are not aware 

 that good material for botanical articles lie close about 

 their doors. We are doubtless most impressed with 

 articles about the flora of a distant land because the plants 

 composing it present very striking differences when com- 

 pared with those that surround us; but if any one will 

 investigate the plants of his own immediate vicinity from 

 the standpoint of their habitat he will find that the plant 

 groups inhabiting a lake, a sphagnum bog, an ordinary 

 swamp, a ravine, a dry hill-top or a rich meadow differ 

 almost as much from one another as his own flora as a 

 whole differs from that of distant lands. The cause of this 

 difference is due to the fact that each plant is modified for 

 its own special habitat. How it is modified and how such 

 modifications aid it in its struggle for existence are 

 problems that in many cases are yet unsolved. Their 

 solution calls for observation and deduction of a very high 

 order and may well engage the best minds in any com- 

 munity. 



