6 PASTORAL AND AGRICULTURAL BOTANY 



from the same cause, and the farmers had ascribed it to the feeding of 

 crimson clover. Another case was reported in the summer of 1895 by 

 Dr. Charles F. Dawson of Washington, who received from a veterinary 

 surgeon of Raleigh, N. C., three balls which he had removed from the 

 intestine of a horse after death. The personal acquaintance of the writer 

 with crimson clover phytobezoars happened some years later when his 

 attention was called to the death of six horses near Westville, N. J. with 

 the receipt of two large balls sent as museum specimens by a former stud- 

 ent, a practicing veterinarian. A bah 1 in the possession of the writer 

 taken from a horse at Oxford, Penna, is about the size of a fist. Coville 

 states that they are nearly spheric and measure from three to four and one- 

 half inches in diameter. The stiff, bristly calyx hairs are matted together 

 and are cemented to some extent by the mucus derived from the digestive 

 tract of the animal in which they form (Fig. 2). 



Cactus Spine Balls. Prof. William Trelease reported in 1897 a still 

 more interesting phytobezoar. "In January, 1897, Dr. Francis Eschan- 

 zier of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, sent to me two specimens, one a ball of 

 surprising accuracy of surface, measuring a little over three and one-half 

 inches in diameter, and weighing seven and one-half ounces, and the other, 

 one-half of a similar ball, about four inches in diameter, and weighing 

 about four ounces, stating that sixteen such balls had been taken from 

 the stomach of a bull at the Hacienda de Cruzes, and adding that he 

 believed them to be composed entirely of an agglomeration of the fibres 

 of some cacti, an undigested portion of which formed the nucleus." 

 Inspection of the balls by Prof. Trelease proved this supposition to have 

 been the correct one. The specimens were of a brown color, and consist- 

 ed of the barbed hairs with which the mamillae of the Plato puntias are 

 armed. In the West and Southwest, where one of the opuntias with long 

 spines is fed to cattle (Opuntia Engelmanni), it is customary to remove 

 the long spines by the use of fire, but this does not entirely remove the 

 danger of their use. The late Dr. Vasey of the U. S. Department of 

 Agriculture gives a number of instances in which cattle have died from 

 an accumulation of spines in the mouth and stomach. 



Leaf Hairs of Plane Trees. Dioscorides and Galen, two early Greek 

 physicians, called attention to the injurious effects of the hairs found on 

 newly expanded leaves of plane trees (Platanus) and on the surface of 

 the ball-like clusters of pistillate flowers. These hairs, which fall off in 

 great numbers, in the spring of the year, if inhaled, produce inflamma- 



