248 



THE GARDENERS' MONTHLY 



[August, 



dread them in the least. We may drink them, or 

 we may eat them, or inhale them ; vegetarians, 

 flesh eaters, wine or water drinkers ; and they will 

 not harm us, unless vital power is too weak to 

 kill them. The ferment fungus — yeast — will 

 worry the wet flour considerably in bread making, 

 because the flour is no longer a living thing. It 

 would have hard work to excite the growing grain. 

 In all these chemical discussions, the sustaining 

 and protective power of life is overlooked. There 

 is a physiological as well as chemical side to all 

 these questions. — Ed. G. M.] 



ZEPHYRANTHES ATAMASCO. 

 BY MRS. J. S. R. THOMSON. 



Whilst on my daily visits to my beds of these 

 fairy lihes, I was astonished to find specimens that 

 had four calyxes and four corollas instead of the 

 regular number, three, and have taken them up — 

 and carefully put in a box — and by advice kindly 

 given me by Prof. Sereno Watson, Harvard 

 University, Mass., I am going to attempt the — 

 to me — difficult task of making it a permanent 

 variety. I find eight or ten plump seed pods now, 

 and would be very grateful for any hints as to the 

 proper mode of procedure, either from the Editor 

 or others. This bulb is the most wondrous seeding 

 variety I have ever met, scarcely a flower fails to 

 make its seed pod, and I propose saving in quan- 

 tities and seeing if " Improved Zephyranthes Ata- 

 masco " also cannot be had by raising from seed ; 

 as a florist claims that he has improved Zephyran- 

 thes Treatae. (Mr. Watson says, " we have no 

 real Amaryllis native here.") I have just examined 

 these seed pods, and one is four-celled instead of 

 three ; all the rest are three-celled, and I would 

 reason it out that the four-celled will be the one to 

 set my double variety. 



[All the early botanists made this plant an Ama- 

 ryllis, but as the knowledge of plants extended a 

 new genus was made out of the old, and thus we 

 have Zephyranthes. Amaryllis, it may be remem- 

 bered in classical story, fled from Zephyrus ; and 

 it seems too bad that after the many thousands of 

 years since the gods dwelt on Mount Olympus, that 

 Zephyrus should get Amaryllis after all. The seed 

 ought to grow easily, in your soil and climate, in 

 sandy soil, sown at once. — Ed. G. M.] 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



On the Disappear.wce of Pith in the Wood 

 OF Plants. — Some years ago Mr. Thomas .Meehan 



called the attention of the Bofanical Section of the 

 Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia to 

 the curious fact that when trees of Elder, Paulow- 

 nia, and other trees that had a very large pith in 

 the young shoots, had comparatively little or none 

 when the young shoot became an old trunk or 

 branch. Wood had evidently been forming in 

 the center of the tree occupying the place of the 

 older pith. 



Dr. J. T. Rothrock, at the meeting of the Botani- 

 cal Section held February 9, called attention to 

 the internal cambium ring in the stem of Gelsemium 

 sempervirens. It might well be designated as the 

 inner cambium. His attention was attracted by 

 the fact that in a stem of three-eighths of an inch 

 diameter, the pith was actually less in diameter 

 than in a twig of a quarter the size of the stem. 

 Microscopic examination showed that in the larger 

 stem there were ordinarily four or more points, at 

 which a well-defined swelling curved inward from 

 the circumference of what should have been the 

 pith-cavity. These swellings resolved themselves 

 when closely examined into : 



1. Toward the center an imperfectly defined 

 membrane, resembling cuticle, which was not 

 always present. 



2. One or more rows of large cells like the 

 parenchyma we find under the epidermal layer. 



3. Several poorly defined layers of smaller cells, 

 such as often mark the limits of growth in bark. 



4. The frequent presence of bast fibres or of 

 sclerenchyma cells. 



5. An evident layer of thin-walled, square cells, 

 closely resembling, though somewhat smaller than 

 those of the external cambium. They showed 

 signs of division, which indicated that they were 

 still a living tissue. 



These facts explained at once why the pith was 

 constantly being encroached upon until it at length 

 almost disappeared. The medullary rays dipped 

 down through, and widened out, in this inner cam- 

 bium, inwardly, just as they did outwardly, in the 

 usual form of cambium layer. He also remarked 

 that bast fibres had long been known to exist in 

 the pith of Tecoma radicans, and in this case 

 something like an inner cambium would be found, 

 though it is more obscure. Sambucus Canadensis 

 also exhibited in the very large stems a smaller 

 pith than in those of moderate size. In this there 

 was nothing comparable to the inner cambium. 

 He also remarked that for the past two winters his 

 I attention had been called to the presence of con- 

 siderable quantities of chlorophyll in the pith of 

 Lycium vulgare. This was not confined to the 



