1897] NOTES AND COMMENTS 303 
and the country of which it is a native will help to crystallise 
certain ideas about that group or order which have been vaguely 
floating in the student’s mind. A considerable sum of money must 
be spent every year in providing the chrysanthemum shows which 
are to be found in many of the parks each autumn. Some of the 
chrysanthemums are beautiful, others very ugly; but we are of 
opinion that the money would be better spent in keeping a variety 
of plants which need the shelter of a house all the year round. 
Such as, for instance, a few temperate orchids, examples of in- 
sectivorous plants and the like, which the ordinary student knows 
only from pictures. The resolution now before the County Council 
has reference probably to laying out beds to illustrate some of the 
more important families, This might be done at very little expense, 
and under proper management would be a great boon to the would- 
be botanist. 
BOTANY OF THE AZORES 
THE Eighth Annual Report of the Missouri Botanical Garden, issued 
by Prof. Trelease, the director, has just reached us. It is prepared 
in the same clear and elaborate style as its predecessors, and gives 
an exhaustive account of the work, educational as well as _ horti- 
cultural, achieved during the year. Excellent reproductions of 
photographs taken in the gardens are again an interesting feature. 
One gives us an idea of the destruction caused by the memorable 
tornado of May 27, 1896, which worked such havoc in St Louis. 
Though the grounds were not actually traversed by the cyclonic 
funnel, the violence of the wind was such that a number of the 
structures were either unroofed or totally wrecked, while some 
450 trees, often of large size, where wholly or practically destroyed, 
and many. of those left standing were seriously broken. Six 
days before the tornado “the most destructive hailstorm that has 
ever been experienced at the garden,’ also caused great damage. 
The scientific papers which occupy the greater part of the volume 
are extra-American in interest, and embody the results of some 
work by the director in the Azores. Mr J. Cardot supplies an 
account of the mosses found on the nine islands. These (excluding 
bog-mosses, of which there are eight) number eighty, fifty of which 
occur also in Madeira and the Canaries, sixty-one in Europe, 
especially the Mediterranean region, and in Algeria, and about forty 
in North America, One found in Flores has been known hitherto 
only from Madagascar and equally distant relationships are shown 
in the distribution of the genus Sciaromiwm, which has three 
species in the Azores, while nearly all its other representatives 
are to be found in New Zealand and temperate South America. 
Seven species are described for the first time. The fact that several 
of the most important islands do not as yet muster together more 
