THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 47 



have been made and most of them refer to this particular tree, 

 but the poplar has no monopoly of such habits and a recent 

 magazine gives an illustration of a mass of pear roots more 

 than sixty feet long and tweleve inches in diameter taken from 

 a tile drain w'hich they had completely clogged. The annual 

 layers on the single root that had caused all the mischief 

 showed it to be only five years old and it was less than an inch 

 in diameter where it entered the drain. 



Hybrid Tragopogons. — Two species of the genus 

 Tragopogon are familiar to American botanists, one the well- 

 known oyster plant or salsify (Tragopogon porrifoUiis) 

 with purplish flowers, and the other, the equally familiar 

 goats-beard or John-go-to-bed-at-noon {T. pratensis) with 

 yellow flowers. The first, usually cultivated in gardens, has 

 occasionally run wild, the other, of no particular use, has 

 been neglected by the gardener but is nevertheless rather the 

 more wide spread of the two. When this vagabond of the fields 

 meets with its aristocratic cousin of the gardens, hybridiza- 

 tion sometimes occurs resulting in plants with smoky purple 

 flowers and other characters intermediate between the two 

 species. This hybrid is better known in Europe, where it is 

 reported from both Britain and the continent and according 

 to Focke was the first hybrid to be produced for scientific pur-j 

 poses, the cross having been accomplished by no less a person 

 than Linnaeus in 1759. Those interested in hybridizing may 

 find these two plants most excellent for experimental pur- 

 poses. 



Orientation of Fibrous Roots. — According to Horti- 

 culture an ingenius Jap has discovered that the small roots 

 of turnips, beets, radishes, carrots and the like grow in two 

 straight lines on each side of the main root, and that further 

 these roots always grow in east and west directions, never 

 north and south. All that is necessary, then is to arrange 



