THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 71 



warm year and then does not mature seed but depends upon 

 its tubers for reproduction. So also the Irish potato (Sola- 

 mum tuberosum) thrives and produces tubers in abundance 

 for a long stretch above where it can mature seed and in its 

 most northern limits of cultivation is almost flowerless. The 

 common cane {Arundinaria macrosperma) which in the tropics 

 bears seed freely has in this latitude only borne seed twice in 

 the past seventy years, (in 1873 and 1864), depending on its 

 rattoons for reproduction. 



So we see that the Apios in thus abandoning the bearing 

 of seed and reproducing itself by tubers protected from the 

 cold in the colder parts of its habitat in only obeying a common 

 law of the reproduction of plants. 



Nor rail, Miss. 



THE LOST STAMEN IN TURTLE-HEAD. 



BY S. C. WADMOND. 



LAST summer I had been down in the marsh of a Sunday 

 afternoon, and with other things brought home some 

 turtle-head (Chelone glabra), its long spikes looming up con- 

 spiculously in the flower vase. I happened to take a flower 

 from one spike and split it open in an indififerent fashion when 

 I became immediately interested, for I counted five perfect 

 anther-bearing stamens! I remembered that this was uncom- 

 mon amongst the Figworts, and so looked up tlie description 

 of Cheloue in the manuals. None of them made mention any- 

 where of the occasional or even rare occurrence of five antheri- 

 ferous stamens in Chcloiic. J\Tbascum being the only genus in 

 our Figworts which has five anther-bearing stamens. I hasten- 

 ed to slit open another flower and another, until several spikes 

 were stripped, but all excepting the first showed the regulation 

 four stamens with their curious woolly heart-shaped anthers, 

 and a fifth sterile filament smaller than the others. 



Many days thereafter I chanced to be glancing through 



