THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 63 



The modern educated farmer may be ignorant of Plato's 

 somewhat speckled philosophy, he may not be up on the 

 scandalous biographies of heathen gods, he may not know 

 about Helen's beauty or Achilles' heel, but he knows the differ- 

 ence in soils, he knows the beautiful processes by which the 

 seed goes from budding sprout to splendid stalk and ripening 

 grain. He knows how to milk a cow and how to select one. 

 He knows the blessings of clover fields and the reas- 

 ons wh}^ they are blessings. Being educated, he sees back of 

 plant and flower and waving grain field, and cloud and sun- 

 shine and storm, a reason, always, and because he has reasons, 

 the comfort of living is greater and the profits of living is 

 enhanced. — Hon. H. C. Adams. 



The Single-leaved Locust. — Through the kindness of 

 Mr. H. C. Skeels of Lockport. Illinois, the editor was recently 

 able to add a specimen of the single-leaved locust {Robinia 

 pseudacacia monophylla) to his other botanical curios. This 

 plant is all respects like the common locust except that instead 

 of the leaf being composed of several pairs of pinnae, it con- 

 sists of but one leaflet. At first glance this single leaflet 

 might be mistaken for a simple leaf, but a closer examination 

 shows that it is jointed to the stem or rachis, as all proper 

 locust leaflets should be. In this respect it resembles the 

 orange tree, which is usually supposed to have simple leaves, 

 but which actually has pinnate ones with a single leaflet. 

 There are species of orange with trifoliate leaves, but our com- 

 mon species is unifoliate. The unifoliate locust tree differs 

 from the type in producing slenderer thorns, but as these 

 thorns are parts of the leaf, it is to be expected that whatever 

 influenced the disappearance of the other leaflets would also 

 affect the thorns. 



