104 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



bleeding heart and iris? Are these zygomorphic flowers? 

 They arc \ery frequently regarded as zygomorphic but they 

 are not, according to our definition ; they are quite regular. 

 Sometimes, however, the definition is extended to include 

 flowers that may be disected into halves in more than one 

 plane but here we crowd the conception of the regular (^r 

 actinomorphic flower. The iris and bleeding heart, however, 

 look so much like zygomorphic or irregular flowers that they 

 are often so designated without a protest from the botanist. 



Botanizing Martins. — On various pages of this maga- 

 zine we have recorded instances of birds which deck their 

 nests with flowers. That the common purple martin also has 

 this habit appears to be overlooked. During the flowering 

 season of the peach, a colony of martins in the editor's gar- 

 tlen were busily engaged in carrying peach petals into their 

 nesting boxes and when these failed they turned their atten- 

 tion to the leaves of the Chinese poplar and soon completely 

 defoliated several of the leading shoots. Their method with 

 the long flexible twigs of this tree is to alight near the tip 

 and then as it bends down with tlieir weiglit. to hurriedly 

 snatch a leaf and get away before being upset. 



Thk V^KINING OF Leaves. — Only two of the great groups 

 of plants have true leaves. These are the Spcrniatophytes, or 

 flowering plants, and the Pteridophytes or ferns. In the 

 Sperniatoi)h\tes. the two dixisions. nionocots and dicots have 

 each a separate and distinct kind of \eining. and the vcining 

 of ferns is different from either. It is customary to distin- 

 guish these forms by saying that the venation of fern> i- 

 forked, that of monocots is ])arallel. and that of dicots is 

 netted. l)ut this is far from correctly expressing it. In the 

 netted pattern, for instance, each group will be found to 

 have numerous species in which the veins form a conspicuous 

 network. The student of ferns who relies upon the con\en- 



