276 
hanging lianes or fallen trunks with their loads of epiphytes 
drop over the cliffs, is any living vegetation to be seen below 
the high water mark mentioned. 
Here again botanists have an opportunity such as is rarely 
presented to them, of studying the occupation by plants of an 
area in which all the conditions for plant life except a soil are 
present to a nearly optimum degree. It seems safe to predict 
that the reoccupation of this denuded area, especially of the 
tops of the boulders, by even the first plants, will necessarily be 
slow. The accumulation of a humus to support a vegetation 
such as that described by Shreve will probably take centuries. 
frequency of floods of this disastrous character. It likewise 
indicates the length of time through which the study of the 
reinvasion must be studied. 
Duncan S. JOHNSON. 
Jouns Hopkins las aid 
BALTIMORE, 
NOTES, NEWS AND COMMENT. 
Professor H. L. Bolley, dean of the department of biology in 
the North Dakota Agricultural College, called at the Garden 
recently on his way to Washington to attend a meeting of the 
Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment 
Stations. 
The collection of lady-slippers, or Venus-slippers, represented 
by the genera Paphiopedilum and Phragmipedium, are now in 
full bloom. These are located in houses 12 and 14 of conserva- 
tory range no. 1. A great part of these are from the collection 
of Mr. Oakes Ames, who presented his large orchid collection 
to the garden in 1907. Some very interesting color-variations 
are represented in the yellow forms of Paphiopedilum insigne. 
These are in house no. 15, and should be compared with the type 
forms in house no. 12. 
A specimen of the ‘‘Hottentot’s head,” Stangeria eriopus, in con- 
servatory range no. 2, New York Botanical Garden, is now bearing 
