.89. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 657 



In the Gaydeners Chronicle for September 3rd is a description of a 

 new fruit, raised by Mr. Culverwell, a hybrid between the gooseberry 

 {Ribes grossidana) and the black currant {Ribes nigrum). As both the 

 plants belong to the same genus, the production of a fruit-bearing 

 hybrid is not a surprise. One who has seen the bush says it "looks 

 Hke a gooseberry bush with currant-Uke leaves, and the fruits are like 

 small gooseberries in bunches of two, three, or four on one stalk." 

 The fruits were seedless, of the size of black currants, but coloured 

 like a red gooseberry and beset with fine hairs. The spines so 

 noticeable in the gooseberry were absent. The flavour "partook of that 

 of the gooseberry mixed with that of the black currant, an improve- 

 ment on both as it seemed to us." 



Lieutenant Stuart Wortley, who has been experimenting 

 at the Agricultural College at Downton on the poisonous principle of 

 the Yew, has arrived at a somewhat curious result, which he has 

 communicated to the Times, with an account of his experiments. His 

 object was to test a theory which declared the female Yew to be 

 harmless to cattle, the male plant only being poisonous ; and the 

 Lieutenant, having chemically analysed the plants, declares that taxin, 

 the presumed poisonous principle, is contained chiefly or entirely in 

 the male plant. We may accordingly grow the female in our parks 

 and pastures with no fear of the results to our cattle, but, as 

 the Gardener's Chronicle aptly observes, " how are we to know 

 before flowering which is the male and which the female ? " Some- 

 times, too, the female Yew produces also male flowers ; will it then 

 also develop taxin and become poisonous ? M. Ch. Cornevin, in his 

 Plantes Veneneuses, published in 1887, mentions no difference between 

 the sexes, but says that the young leaves are comparatively harmless, 

 while as they grow older and deeper in colour they become more and 

 more poisonous. 



In Zoe for last July, Mr. Wm. W. Price tells of his discovery of 

 a locality for the gigantic red-wood trees {Sequoia gigantea) further 

 north than any hitherto known. In Placer County, fifteen miles east 

 of Forest Hill, on one of the streams flowing into the middle fork of 

 the American River, at an altitude of about 5,000 feet, he found a 

 small grove of six trees occupying about an acre of ground. Though 

 unrecorded by naturalists, it is not unknown to prospectors, as many 

 dates were found cut in the bark of neighbouring alder trees. The 

 two largest sequoias are about 12 ft. in diameter, but a fallen trunk 

 measured 20 ft. across. The position is a very sheltered one, shut in 

 by the sides of a small, thickly wooded canon, a fact which may 

 account for the presence of these stragglers so far north. So secluded 

 is the spot, that the trees cannot be seen till within a hundred yards, 

 and Mr. Price was only enabled to find it by the help of a miner from 



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