494 The Botanical Gazette. [November, 
when they left their briny home eight years ago, and the 
thread-like pollen is floating about, the whole telling the won- 
derful story of cross pollination in one of its thousand ways 
of adapting means to an end. 
The most difficult task I ever gave my baby press was to 
prepare me a perfect diagram of the flower of a xyris. I 
think I may say that it is literally impossible to show the de- 
The flowers were very beautiful as I gathered the plants. I 
had never realized that the xyris had a blossom with such 
exquisitely yellow petals. My herbarium showed nothing 
like it. Even when I put the specimen immediately into 
press, the hard scaly head allowed the blossom to wither. 
The operation of dissecting the flower was too delicate and 
too long a process to perform in the field, so I took home 
several flower heads in addition to my other specimens. I! 
put them into a vase of water to get fresh blossoms in the 
morning. Sure enough when I visited them, a flower was 
slowly pushing its way up from behind its bract, and I saw, 
to my joy, that the flower was pushing ahead of it the ante- 
rior sepal which encloses the corolla, and falls as the blossom 
opens. How often had I read these words in the Gray Man- 
ual, ‘‘enwrapping the corolla in the bud and deciduous with 
it." Now I saw the performance for myself. As the flower 
opened, the sepal fell, and I caught it on the fly. Then, 
working undera lens, I dissected the flower and put into my 
baby press the three sepals, three petals with their inserted 
stamens, and the ovary with its three-cleft style. Attached 
to the base of the ovary are the three thread-like sterile fila- 
ments, beautifully cleft and bearded at the apex. I after- 
wards mounted them in diagrammatic form on a bit of white 
Paper, and they are now in a pocket on one of my herbarium 
sheets, ready and anxious for inspection. 
A pressed specimen of 77 rapa natans L., the water-chestnut, 
can hardly show the small white ephemeral flower in the cen- 
ter of the rosette of leaves. The press enabled me to do it, 
as I collected the plant on the Concord: river in Concord, 
ass. It is an introduction from Europe and has been in 
the river for years, thoroughly established and keeping com- 
pany with Marsilia guadrifolia L., which is so abundant as 
_ to impede the oars as you rowthroughit. 
