28o 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 437. 



tanning leather. This tannery, which is furnished with eleven 

 large tanks, is said to have capacity enough to tan all the hides 

 produced in Florida. 



During June 520,000 bunches of bananas were sold at whole- 

 sale in this city, 16,000 bunches more than were imported in 

 the same month a year ago. 



The United States Consul at Havre, France, recently sent 

 home some samples of new textile fabrics which were exhib- 

 ited at the State Department in Washington. They were 

 woven from the fibres of peat, which, as they proved, can be 

 bleached to whiteness and will then take any dye. These fab- 

 rics are said to be especially advantageous from the fact that 

 they have antiseptic qualities which will prevent them from 

 harboring disease germs. 



Professor R. L. Watts, the horticulturist of the Tennessee 

 Agricultural Experiment Station, has written a short treatise 

 on Onion-culture, which has been published as a farmers' 

 bulletin by the United States Department of Agriculture. It is 

 one of those useful little monographs which the department is 

 issuing from time to time, and which are very successful in 

 selecting the important phases of a subject and treating them 

 thoroughly, and yet concisely and in a practical straightforward 

 way, which cannot but be helpful to any careful reader. 



We have spoken in another column of the value of the 

 hybrid Philadelphus Lemoinei as a flowering shrub in this 

 country, and we have just received a note from an English 

 correspondent who states that masses of this shrub were 

 among the most attractive features of Kew Gardens in the 

 middle of June. The plants were set in large groups, and 

 although they were no more than two feet high they were 

 covered with their white and fragrant flowers, while the light- 

 colored foliage makes them attractive all the summer through. 



At a wood-pulp mill at Elsenthal, in Austria, a trial was 

 recently made to show how quickly living trees could be con- 

 verted into newspapers. At J.35 o'clock in the morning three 

 trees were felled. By 9.34 the wood had been stripped of its 

 bark, cut into suitable pieces for the mill, converted into pulp 

 and pressed into paper. Then it was passed from the factory 

 to a neighboring printing-press, and the first printed and 

 folded copy of the journal was ready for perusal at ten o'clock, 

 just 145 minutes after the axe had been laid to the standing 

 trees. 



Bulletin No. 1 of the Geological and Natural History Survey 

 of the Chicago Academy of Sciences is devoted to an account 

 of the Lichen flora of Chicago and vicinity, by William Wirt 

 Calkins. It is the initial number of a series of publications in 

 which the Chicago Academy of Sciences proposes to discuss 

 the botany, zoology and geology in the neighborhood of 

 Chicago. The area which it is proposed to include in the sur- 

 vey is about fifty miles square, leaving, after deducting the 

 water-covered portions, nearly 1,800 square miles, and com- 

 prises all of Cook and Du Page counties, the nine northern 

 townships of Will County and a portion of Lake County, 

 Indiana. 



The famous Great Tun long shown to tourists in Heidelberg 

 Castle, in Germany, and hitherto the largest in the world, is 

 greatly exceeded in size by one recently constructed on the 

 St. George Vineyard, at Fresno, in California. This cask is 

 thirty feet in height and about twenty-six in diameter and holds 

 79.000 gallons of wine, while the Heidelberg cask holds about 

 42,000. It is built of redwood obtained from the forests of 

 Humboldt County. The lumber required would have sufficed 

 to build a large house, and two car-loads of steel hoops were 

 needed to bind the immense staves together. As these had 

 to be absolutely free from flaws of every kind, not one piece 

 of timber in ten was found perfect enough for use. 



Cork has been tried as a paving material in Vienna and Lon- 

 don with much success. It is granulated, mixed with mineral 

 asphalt and other cohesive materials, and compressed into 

 blocks of suitable size, which are embedded in tar and rest 

 upon a concrete foundation six inches in thickness. The 

 advantages claimed for cork pavements are cleanliness, noise- 

 lessness, elasticity, durability, moderate cost and freedom from 

 the slipperiness which, in wet weather, makes asphalt pave- 

 ments undesirable. Moreover, unlike wooden pavements, 

 they are non-absorbent, and therefore inodorous. Samples 

 taken from a London street near the Great Eastern Railway 

 station, where traffic is very heavy, had been reduced in thick- 

 ness by less than one-eighth of an inch after being in use 

 almost two years. 



Professor Lucius Marcus Underwood, at present Professor 

 of Botanv in the Mechanical and Agricultural College of Ala- 



bama, has been appointed to the position at the head of the 

 botanical faculty of Columbia College in this city, recently 

 resigned by Professor Britton when he was offered the post 

 of director of the city's new Botanical Garden, and now 

 made Professor Emeritus. Professor Underwood has partic- 

 ularly devoted himself to the study of cryptogamic plants, and 

 is an authority on the Ferns and their allies and on several 

 groups of fungi. Previous to his appointment to the chair he 

 now fills he had been Professor of Botany at Syracuse Univer- 

 sity and at De Pauw University. He represented the United 

 States at the international botanical congress held in Genoa in 

 1889, has been vice-president of the botanical section of the 

 American Association for the Advancement of Science, and 

 has published numerous botanical papers. He will begin his 

 work at Columbia in the autumn. 



A large consignment of fruits from Victoria was exhibited 

 not long ago in London. There were apples of many sorts, all 

 in good condition, together with pumpkins, custard-melons 

 and pineapples. Some of the English papers seem to be espe- 

 cially exasperated at the fact that the English markets should 

 be filled with apples when the home-grown fruit is said to be 

 the best in the world, and it is recommended in a leading 

 paper that the Chambers of Agriculture should send out half 

 a dozen men to study the system of fruit-growing pursued in 

 Canada, the United States and Australia, so as to instruct Eng- 

 lish fruit growers against such injurious competition. But no 

 amount of instruction would help English farmers to grow 

 custard-melons and pineapples at home, while early winter 

 and late autumn apples are not to be found in June except in 

 the southern hemisphere. No doubt, English fruit growers 

 can improve on their methods, but they never can grow 

 enough fruit for home consumption, and it ought to be a mat- 

 ter of self-congratulation in England that her commercial rela- 

 tions and facilities are such that she is able to get the best of 

 fpuits from her colonies and elsewhere all the year round. 



It is well known that fermentation of different kinds is due to 

 the action of certain yeast-plants, and that different plants give 

 different results. In butter-making, for instance, it is now the 

 practice to cultivate in marketable quantities the varieties of 

 ferments which will give the best quality and flavor to butter. 

 It has been proved, too, that the bouquet of different wines 

 depends largely on the ferment which develops in the juices 

 of the grape, so that there are many distinct wine-yeasts culti- 

 vated and sold, the different varieties giving special bouquets 

 to the wines in which they are used. More recent experiments 

 show that the best of the wine-yeasts can be used in the fer- 

 mentation of cider and the juice of berries, so that it is said to 

 be possible to make a wine from cider which possesses the 

 bouquet of Rudesheimer. At the recent horticultural exhi- 

 bition at Berlin one of the most interesting exhibits in the 

 scientific section was a collection of these clean yeast-cultures 

 in gelatine, as well as of the injurious yeasts and microphoto- 

 graphs of both. Since the keeping quality and flavor of the 

 wine both depend so largely on the quality of the yeast which 

 brings about the fermentation, these microscopic plants have 

 assumed great importance in agricultural economy. 



An interesting bulletin has just been issued by the Rhode 

 Island Experiment Station on AppleCulture, which has received 

 a new impetus in that state since the spray pump has been 

 used as a means of warfare against pests, so that neglected 

 orchards in that region are now being pruned and fertilized 

 until they have become productive and valuable. Apple-trees 

 have come to be regarded as cultivated plants which must be 

 regularly supplied with food, and since the roots extend wide 

 as well as deep it is found necessary to apply fertilizers over 

 the entire space where they spread. Apple-trees need much 

 moisture, and when this is lacking the fruit falls unripe and 

 the winter varieties decay prematurely. Mulching is essential, 

 and if the tops of the trees are allowed to shade the ground 

 and prevent the free movement of air currents over the roots 

 during drought the value of the mulch is greatly increased. 

 The form of the tops in different varieties naturally differs, but 

 all need a large leaf area exposed to the light if good crops are 

 expected. The Greening, for example, forms a more spread- 

 ing top than the Baldwin or Roxbury Russet, but the limbs of 

 the last two droop to the ground in mature trees. Strong 

 light promotes the formation of the fruit-buds, and the inter- 

 lacing of the branches of adjacent trees is unfavorable to their 

 formation, a fact which is graphically illustrated by pictures of 

 twigs grown in the sunlight and in the shade. Directions for 

 combating the various fungi and insects are full and complete, 

 and it is suggested that poultry can be used to good advantage 

 against the apple maggot. Altogether this is a valuable 

 paper. 



