1879. 



AND HORTICULTURIST. 



117 



none of the people ever knew anything about 

 it, as being good tire wood. Last fall, I was 

 with a team up the canyon, along a fine road we 

 had built beside the cliffs, and I saw at the 

 mouth of a gulch, a great many pieces of old 

 looking and dried up logs, which I had hauled 

 down, and then we had fires, for it was Pinion. 



"A great many of these pieces were two and 

 three feet long, broken square off; others were 

 longer, and there were a good many pieces a 

 foot long, and three to four inches thick, and as 

 heavy as if they had been water-soaked for a 

 thousand years, while all of them had a terrible 

 old, battered look. I judge that when a tree 

 decayed far up the mountains, several hundred 

 years ago, it got moved a little, perhaps by fall- 

 ing rocks, then was thrown into a gulch by some 

 great fall of water, and then the whole "was 

 dashed along with rocks, through canyons and 

 over precipices, and finally debouched into the 

 little valley below. 



"This wood is easily chopped, and it is as easily 

 split, and I prefer to take as knotty and crooked 

 a log as there is, and smash away at it with an axe, 

 and though the wood is dense, I can break it up 

 into fragments three, four, six and eight inches 

 across, and the waste is a trifle. A saw does not 

 work well, for it pinches ; besides a sharp buck- 

 saw does not long remain so. My practice is to 

 have a bushel basket full of such fragrtients 

 brought into my room, and there it stands on the 

 old hearth, and when the coal fire gets down, I 

 put in a piece as big as my hand, and it burns right 



away. I fill the stove full of coal just before I 

 go to bed, and so there is a fire all night, and 

 water seldom freezes, and as my bed is close to 

 the stove, and as I have a blanket over my head, 

 I do not feel the terrible wind that blows out of 

 the canyon from sunset to sunrise, though it 

 whistles through the crevices of the logs as if 

 it would like to cut one in two. 



"Just before daylight, I get up, shake the grate, 

 open the dampers, fill the lower part of the 

 stove with pinion chunks, place a kettle of water 

 on top, then fill up with coal, and hop back to 

 bed, and, sir, before I touch my pillow, that 

 pinion has blazed up, and in less than a minute 

 the stove is in a flutter, the flames rush like the 

 escape of the steam from a railroad locomotive, 

 and in the space of ten minutes the stove is red 

 hot, the room glows with a summer heat, re- 

 maining so for a full hour, and we rise and dress 

 at our leisure. 



"Down at the open gulches of Powell Valley, 

 plenty of Pinion is found. I remember I brought 

 home in the wagon a couple of sticks, three feet 

 long and four inches in diameter, lying [among 

 sage brush, and they had been there so long that 

 probably a hundred rattlesnakes had crawled 

 over them, say from the twelfth to the nine- 

 teenth century ; and getting home late of a 

 frosty evening, I put these sticks on a low fire, 

 good enough for a woman to sit and knit by, and 

 in ten minutes we had a fire that Shadrach, Me- 

 shech and Abednego would stop to look at 

 twice. Tills is all I know about Pinion." 



Natural History and Science. 



COMMUNICA TIONS. 



CARNIVOROUS PLANTS. 



BY PETER HENDERSON. 



In the February number, Mr. C. W. Seeyle in 

 reply to my article on this subject asks if by 

 what I say, I mean to convey the idea that the 

 Dionsea is not carnivorous. I reply to this, that 

 the results of my experiments went to confirm 

 that impression, not only as regarding the shell 

 snails of Mr. Smith, but also our own fly " feed- 

 ing" of them, for as I have clearly stated, the 



I result showed that no improvement was discern- 

 iable in those that had been "fed," over those 

 that had not been "fed." Mr. Seeyle further 

 says that from my remarks he is left in 

 doubt, " whether the plants did in any sense 

 assimilate or feed on the insects." I too am 

 left in doubt in this matter except to believe 

 that if they did " assimilate food " their diges- 

 tive apparatus was in some way defective, for 

 the " food" certainly did not add to their size or 

 beauty. Mr. Seeyle mis-quotes me when he 

 says I said " each plant was fed daily for three 

 months-," if he will look again he will see I did 



