THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 81 



The Water Hyacinth — One of the prettiest sights in 

 the tropics is a sluggish stream or sunny bayou filled with a 

 colony of water hyacinths (Piaropus crassipes) in full bloom. 

 Notwithstanding this the plant is frequently regarded as a 

 bad weed, for it multiplies so rapidly as to become a serious 

 inenace to navigation on many streams. For some years the 

 national government has been tr}^ing to destroy these plants in 

 the St. John's river in Florida but a post-card recently received 

 from that region shows a portion of the stream crowded from 

 bank to bank with the hyacinths with a small steamer blockaded 

 in their midst. While constant attacks upon the plant may 

 serve to keep the channel open in slow rivers, it is doubtless out 

 of the question to expect to exterminate it in regions where 

 the cold of winter is not sufficient to kill it. The plant is not 

 native to Florida but behaves in all ways as if it were. 



Fruiting of Trailing Arbutus. — The trailing arbutus 

 (Epigaea repens) is one of the plants that seldom bear fruit, 

 but whether this lack is due to the close picking to which the 

 blossoms are subjected each season or whether there is a 

 deeper physiological reason does not seem to be generally 

 known. Certainly it is not due to other rapid ways of multi- 

 plying such as are possessed by the potato and artichoke. The 

 blossoms of the arbutus are commonly supposed to be dimor- 

 phic, but more than forty years ago. Thomas Meehan pointed 

 out that instead of the flowers being long and short styled, with 

 stamens to correspond, they are more properly classed as dioe- 

 cious, the flowers with perfect pistils having imperfect stamens 

 and vice-versa. In none of these flowers, however, are either 

 set of the essential organs entirely missing. It is to be noted 

 that there is a sort of dimorphism in the flowers, after all, 

 for in the pistillate form there are blossoms with long and 

 others with short styles, while the staminate flowers have 

 long and short stamens with perfect anthers. With flowers 



