THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 113 



or banana bean {Mucuna iifilis) completes the list of our com- 

 mon beans. This latter is a native of the tropics and is likely 

 to be redistricted to the warmer parts of America. It is used 

 for a forage crop and for plowing under to enrich the soil. 



HoREHOUND FOR THE MILLION. — One of the weeds that 

 amount almost to a pest in Southern California is the com- 

 mon horehound (Marnibiuin z'ulgarc) of the old fashioned 

 herb garden. It is abundant wherever the ground is culti- 

 vated, and its matured seed-vessels cling by prickles to the 

 wool of animals and to the clothing of pedestrians in the per- 

 sistent fashion of the begar's ticks and Spanish needles of 

 the East. The average Eastern tourist with interest enough 

 in plants to notice it at all, usually mistakes it for catnip, but 

 curiously enough the latter herb seems never to have become 

 wild here. At least, I have never seen it, nor do the local 

 manuals list it. — C. F. Saunders, Pasadena, California. 



Butter-cups and Daisies. — It would be hard for resi- 

 dents in some sections of the Eastern States to imagine a re- 

 gion in which the common butter-cup and daisies are rare 

 or unknown but such a condition prevails in the editor's vi- 

 cinity; indeed, at the present time, a thriving bunch of the 

 plant which in other regions is the despised white weed or ox- 

 eye daisy, is blooming among the other flowers in his garden. 

 Now and then, one may find a tuft of this plant along the rail- 

 road like a tramp looking for fresh fields, but the flowers are as 

 yet an absolute novelty to most people who have never made 

 a visit to the east. As to butter-cups, while there are plenty 

 of indigenous species Ranitncuhis acris so common in the east 

 is decidedly a rare plant. In this connection it may be of 

 interest to note that the bla:k-eyed-Susan (Rudbcekia hirfa) 

 rarely if ever fills up single fields to the exclusion of every- 

 thing else as it does in the east. Here it occurs scattered 

 among other species that hold it within bounds. 



