7& THE AMERICAN BOTANIS'T^ 



kind. In their native haunts the white ones are scatterefl 

 among those of normal color, much as the white-flowered 

 form of the closed gentian occurs among the blue ones but 

 nobody would consider these latter as separate species. 

 In asking if the white form comes true from seed we had 

 in mind the idea of stimulating further experiments in this 

 line. There is the possibilit_y that the plants of the Hack- 

 ensack Meadows are not identical with those introduced 

 by Mr. Bassett, If there were any pink ones at all in the 

 progeny of the white-flowered form we would not be in- 

 clined to consider the two distinct. — Ed.] 



Cleistogamous Flowers of Sundew.— The editor of 

 Nature Notes observes that in forty years he has only once 

 or twice seen the flowers of the sundew open and asserts 

 that they are self fertile and almost always cleistogene. 

 We asvsume that these remarks refer to the round-leaved 

 sundew {Drosera rotundifolia) and if so, our observations 

 do not agree for we have usually found the flowers open 

 at the proper season and have seen them thus within a 

 week. There would seem to be some error in calling these 

 closed flowers, ckistogenes, however, A cleistogene is 

 commonly regarded as a closed flower that shows consid- 

 erable reduction in its parts especially as regards petals 

 and stamens, otherwise the flowers of the closed gentian 

 {Gentiana Andrewsii) might be called cleistogene- Pos- 

 sibly the behavior of the sundew may indicate the way in 

 which cleistogamous flowers have originated. 



In the Sign of the Moon, — Mr. Elw^yn Waller has 

 favored us with the following contribution regarding the 

 influence of the moon on vegetation taken from a recent 

 issue of the Transactions of the American Institute of 

 Mining Engineers. "It is the general belief of the natives 

 of the country [Panama] that timber must be cut in the 

 period after the full moon and before the new moon, or 

 otherwise it will soon decay. This belief is always regard- 

 ed by strangers in the country as a superstition ; Ijut ex- 

 perience shows it to be based on fact. With the hardest 

 varieties of wood in use, such as black guiacan or nispero, 



