1884.] NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA. 31 



indicated, Mr. Meehan believed the atmospheric conditions, as 

 regards shelter from wind or from drying atmospheric currents, 

 must be very favorable to induce longevity under such circum- 

 stances. There seemed to be no reason why these trees might 

 not reach the full average duration of two hundred years, which 

 he had before named as about the duration of most trees of the 

 Eastern United States. 



Prof. Sheafer gave some instances indicating th-at the average 

 might be higher than the figures he had offered. 



Parasitism in Boschniakia glabra, E. Meyer. — Mr. Meehan 

 exhibited a specimen of this Orobanchiaceous plant collected by 

 him last summer, growing among alders in the track of the 

 retreating Davidson Glacier, near Pyramid Harbor, lat. 59°, in 

 Alaska, and remarked that the life-histories of this class 

 of parasitic plants were but imperfectly known, and every 

 new fact of interest. In the Yosemite Valley last year, with Mr. 

 John M. Hutchings and Dr. Charles Shaffer, of the Academy, 

 they had carefully dug out masses of eai'th with the snow plant 

 of the Sierras. Sarcodes sanguinea, and then tenderly washed 

 out ever}' particle of earth in a stream near by. There was not 

 the slightest sign of attachment to any root, and no root of any- 

 thing to be found in the mass of earth. There were not even the 

 slightest remains of any dead vegetation which could suggest 

 that the plant was even a saprophyte, as was generally found in 

 the case of Monotropa unifiora. There was nothing but a huge 

 mass of coralline fleshy matter, out of which the inflorescence 

 rose. The origin of this fleshy mass was yet the unsolved mys- 

 tery. From analogy with the behavior of other plants, he 

 was inclined to believe that there was some parasitic attachment 

 in the early life of the plant, and that it stored up in this coralline 

 mass enough nutrition in one season to support the inflorescence 

 of another, and, after this was done, severed the connection, 

 leaving no trace by the time the mass was large enough to 

 support the heavy drain of the large and juicy inflorescence. In 

 BoschMiakia, something of this sort had evidently taken place. 

 The plants were in an early flowering stage, and all, when drawn 

 out of the ground, had a single thread-like root depending from 

 the centre of the pseudo-bulbous base of the plant, as in the speci- 

 men exhibited. These threads, now hard and wood-like, broke off 

 very easily at the time, and it did not occur to the collector that 

 they might be alder roots, as the densit}' of the substance might 

 now suggest. The desire to botanize over as large a tract as 

 possible in the six hours given by the commander of the ship, 

 did not admit of time to dig down and ascertain directly whether 

 these threads were alder roots, and in direct connection with the 

 living alder plants ; but it would be remarkable, if the^^ should be 

 alder roots-, and the Boschniakia sessile on them, that the plants 

 should all select roots of the same slender size, and so nearly 



