PARTRIDGE-BERRY. 35 



botanists, and a valued correspondent of the founder of our science. 

 He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and is known in botanical 

 science as the author of several short treatises on botany, which 

 were issued in a collected form in London, in 1769. He certainly 

 is among the most fortunate of men to have his name and memory 

 embalmed in a plant at once so charming and so widely distributed 

 as is the Mitchella repens. There is but one other species be- 

 longing to that genus, and that is found in Japan. Dr. Gray has 

 shown, in a very interesting paper, that many of our North Amer- 

 ican forms are represented in the flora of that country. The 

 Mayflower, or trailing Arbutus, so widely and deservedly popular 

 in New England, is a case quite similar to that of the Mitchella. 

 There is but one other species of the Epigcea known, and that is 

 a native of Japan. 



The most careless observer could scarcely fail to notice, that the 

 bright red berry is furnished with a double "blow end," as though 

 two flowers had assisted in its production. Such is the case. A 

 single ovary bears twin flowers, which, indeed, sometimes come to 

 be something more than " Siamese-twin " flowers, for they occa- 

 sionally coalesce and form a single flower with an eight-lobed 

 corolla. Commonly, however, they are quite separate, and fructify 

 the corresponding segments of the compound ovary on which they 

 grow. The flowers themselves have individual peculiarities. In 

 some the pistil is long and stands out beyond the mouth of the little 

 hairy tube of the corolla, while the stamens are short and are con- 

 cealed somewhere down in its obscure depths. Other flowers will 

 show an arrangement exactly the opposite of this, the pistil, with 

 its four-parted stigma, will be short and hidden away in the tube 

 while the 'stamens will protrude. It is evident that flowers, built 



