i8o 



a few months of the end. Doctor Britton was a man of simple 

 habits of life and of modest demeanor. He was of a usually placid 

 and cheerful temperament, which was notably manifest during the 

 long weeks of suffering that preceded his death. He left a sister 

 and a brother, Harriet Louise Britton and Richard H. Britton, both 

 of Great Kills, Staten Island. Doctor and Mrs. Britton had no 

 children. In a way that was very real to them, The New York 

 Botanical Garden was their child. 



During his directorship of thirty-three years — a short space 

 of time as the world goes — Doctor Britton had seen The New 

 York Botanical Garden develop from little more than an idea to a 

 well-developed tract of nearly 400 acres, with handsome buildings, 

 an herbarium of more than 1,700,000 specimens, and a library of 

 43,500 bound volumes. As many have remarked, The New York 

 Botanical Garden is a living monument to Nathaniel Lord Britton. 

 It is a noble monument — a monument worthy of the man ! 



Marshall A. Howe. 



DO CYCADS BRANCH? 



In many text-books of botany and in floras one may find state- 

 ments like, "Tropical plants, with an unbranched cylindrical trunk, 



increasing like palms by a single terminal bud ; ." Such 



phrases occur in descriptions of cycads. It is true that cycads, at 

 least those with aerial erect stems, as we usually see them in culti- 

 vation, are simple-stemmed. Those with underground stems in 

 cultivation we cannot vouch for one way or another. 



Florida can boast of four species of the cycad Zamia, the com- 

 mercial name for which is Florida-arrowroot. The popular names 

 are coontie, conti, comptie, comfort-root, and wild sago. 



Two paragraphs of information, the first from Commodore 

 Ralph Munroe of Miami and the other from the late Mrs. Mary A. 

 Noble of Inverness, are inserted here. 



"As to cultivation of Coontie, think I am safe in stating that it 

 never has been successfully done. It was about the first southern 

 Florida production thai I attempted to commercialize, but from all 

 sources available at that time — 1882 — up to the present, have never 



