52 



THE GARDENERS' MONTHLY 



February, 



islet of the 'Lady of thi- Lake' are its favorite 

 sites." I 



OsAGK Oran(;e for Silk Wokms. — Col. M. B. ! 

 Hillyard, who, perhaps, more than any living man ! 

 has devote. 11\ given time and money in building 

 up Southern industries, says: "But I warn every 

 one against hoping for any success in a business i 

 point of view, in the use of the osage orange. The | 

 difficultv in securing sufficient leaves, by reason of 



thorns ; the dangers of the succulent leaf, at the 

 late stages of the silkworm, aside from any mooted 

 points on this food, ought to prevent any one using 

 the osage orange, except to learn on. The food 

 answers for a year as food, while you learn silk 

 culture, and until your mulberry trees can be used ; 

 but I think the great authorities will agree that, ex- 

 cept as a diversion, silk culture on osage orange 

 will prove a failure." 



Natural History and Science. 



COMMUNICATIONS. 



CROSS-BREEDING WHEAT. 



BY MR. E. CARMAX, NKW YORK CITV. 



Mr. Veitch, replying to my remarks regarding 

 the cross-breeding of wheat, says that "the cause 

 of failure is owing to the fact that wheat is cleisto- 

 gamous," and that necessarily fertilization takes 

 place while yet the flowers are within the folds of 

 the sheaths. There was no failure in the first 

 place, and in the second if there had been it would 

 not necessarily have been due to the fact of the 

 flowers being cleistogamous. A sharp-pointed 

 stick serves to part the palets and glumes, thus re- 

 vealing the pistils and stamens. If then the an- 

 thers be removed, while yet immature, and pollen 

 be introduced from other varieties of wheat, any 

 seeds that form must be cross-bred. 



The peculiarity I noted in the remarks to which 

 Mr. Veitch refers, was that so many of our cross- 

 bred seeds should so closely resemble the mother 

 parent. I have crossed no less than 2,000 flowers 

 of wheat, and we have now growing thirty kinds, 

 which are different from either parent. All the rest 

 have been rejected because they could not be de- 

 termined from the mother variety. 



It is very plain to those who have tried to cross 

 wheats that they cannot cross through natural 

 agencies — wind or insects. But it is just as plain 

 that a cross can be easily effected by carefully 

 spreading apart the sheaths, removing the green 

 anthers and inserting other anthers when ripe 

 (or gathered pollen), when the stigmas are re- 

 ceptive. 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



Spiral Growth. — Vegetation, as is well known, 

 grows in a spiral direction. Speaking of animals, 

 and in relation to the development of different 

 forms, in a receijt lecture in the hall of the Acad- 

 emy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Miss 

 Grace Anna Lewis remarked : " There is also a 

 tendency to ascend in a spiral, arising from the 

 conflict of these two forces, so that we find why 

 animals rise in grade from lower to higher, and 

 why they must continue to do so as long as the 

 animal world is in existence. There also appears 

 to be a balance of forces between the different 

 branches, one presenting clusters different but 

 complementary to the others. Thus, on the whole, 

 the animal kingdom appears to arise by systems or 

 pairs of branches, by what is termed a method of 

 bichotomus branching." 



EvAPOR.VriON FROM DeAD BRANCHES. — The 

 Neia York Tribune is reported as giving its readers 

 " the novel discovery of Professor Bessey, who has 

 demonstrated that the evaporation from a moist 

 piece of dead wood was exactly like that from a 

 living leaf. Now, when a dead branch is large 

 enough to keep continually moist in the interior, it 

 will in dry air constantly lose water by evaporation 

 from its surface. This water so lost is taken from 

 the tree, and must have been supplied directly or 

 indirectly by the living portions. Moreover, it 

 must be remembered that a living branch is well 

 protected against loss of water through evapora- 

 tion, by the epidermis which covers all its surface 

 when young, or the impervious corky bark which 



