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Vou. IX. DETROIT, FEBRUARY, 1889. No. 2 
ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. 
THE POLLEN OF THE MOON-FLOWER (JPOMGA BONA- 
NOX) AND OF SOME OF ITS ALLIES. 
[ PLATE 11, | 
DR. ALFRED C. STOKES. 
HE reader may remember to have noticed, early in the spring, 
an illustrated advertisement in many newspapers and maga- 
zines, with laudatory reference to a plant there called the “‘ Moon- 
flower.” The picture represented the front of a two-story cottage 
smothered beneath a mass of moon-flower vine, the vine itself loaded 
with a burden of white blossoms whose enormous size seemed 
ludicrous. The advertisemest announced, in very bad English, that 
“the vine will grow fifty feet in one season, its moon-like flowers are 
of the purest white, fifteen inches in cireumference. . The moon- 
flower blooms only at night or on dull days ; it gives out a delicious 
odor similar to the English hawthorn or jessamine.”’ 
The ladies of the family planted a moon-flower. They watered 
it ; they picked the bugs off of it, and the thing grew like Jonah’s 
gourd. I was expecting, indeed rather hoping, to be able to say, “I 
told you so,” when a bud appeared. And such a bud! It was 
twice as long as my finger. One evening it began to bloom. I use 
the word advisedly for, at about seven o’clock that twisted contor- 
tion began visibly to unwind itself, and with a gush of perfume, that 
bud unfolded its great white corolla, deliberately smoothed out the 
wrinkles, and stood trembling on the end of its peduncle a most 
