no THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



Another of the Horrors of War. — The expert writers 

 who undertake to enlighten us through the popular magazines 

 on the technical details of war-construction, sometimes stray 

 fr< im their chosen field into the realms of pure science, with 

 results often more amusing than edifying. An illustration of 

 this is afforded in Air. L. C. Everard's article on "Treenails" 

 in Munsey's Magazine for August, 1918. In discussing the 

 substitutes that have been used to replace the shortage of 

 black-locust in the manufacture of the above-named useful 

 elements of ship-construction, he names the Osage orange, 

 "which," he goes on to say, "is also called bois d'etre, meaning 

 'wood of the ark,' on accoount of its durability." This comes 

 as a severe shock to those of us who were brought up to believe 

 that bois d'etre means "bow-wood," and was so called by the 

 French voyageurs because its toughness and elasticity well 

 adapted it for the making of bows. This popular name was 

 neatly put into Greek by Sargent, who called the genus 

 Toxylon, now unfortunately superseded according to the rules 

 of priority by Nuttall's much more prosaic Madura, in honor 

 of the early geologist, William Maclure. If Mr. Everard will 

 look at his French dictionary, he will find that arc never is used 

 to mean ark, but that Captain Noah's super-transport is desig- 

 nated by the word arche. Whether it was constructed of par- 

 ticularly durable wood is one of those matters that must be 

 left to conjecture, inasmuch as the only information given in 

 the Scriptural account is that it was built of "gopher-wood," 

 which has never been satisfactorily identified, though the 

 weight of critical opinion seems to incline toward some coni- 

 ferous or resinous wood. — /. C. Nelson. [Professor Nelson 

 should know by this time that writers of popular science do 

 not have to be accurate. The more remarkable the item the 

 easier it is to put it over on the New York editors. We notice 

 another recent instance that got by two sapient members of the 

 craft, a publisher and an editor. It is a so-called poem by 



