250 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 170. 



The first saw-mills were built in the redwoods in early days. 

 That at Mendocino City was established in 1850, and has been 

 in continuous operation since, with a present cutting capacity 

 of 60,000 feet a day. This company gives a good illustration 

 of the rate at which cutting progresses. It owns 35,000 acres 

 on Big River, or less than half the water-shed. In its forty 

 years' operations it has cut over less than ten per cent, of its 

 own lands. Most of the large companies have been in opera- 

 tion from twenty to thirty-five years, and several have cut a 

 smaller percentage of their timber than the Mendocino com- 

 pany. On the other hand, all of the timber on some small 

 streams, two to five miles long, has been cut, and the mills 

 moved to new locations. The exceptionally large logs, and 

 the steepness of the slopes, give rise to methods of working 

 peculiar to the Redwood industry. The mills are well equipped, 

 and everything at. the mill is utilized for which there is a 

 market. In the woods the waste is large. 



Oxen are used altogether in the woods, and logging is sum- 

 mer work. For the wood-roads skids are used, which are 

 either greased or kept wet by water-carriers. From three to 

 five yoke of oxen drag several logs attached by dogs and 

 chains. In a few instances slides, or, as they are called here, 

 chutes, are used. The tidal estuaries are used for dams, and 

 a boom keeps the logs in. Redwood-trees have a bulge at the 

 base, and in cutting large trees a staging is built around the 

 base and the trees cut at ten to twelve feet from the ground. 

 Very narrow, long-bladed axes are used by the woodsmen. 

 The thick bark is peeled off before the logs are hauled. As 

 sawdust cannot be dumped into the streams, it is burned in 

 large furnaces. Logs above seven feet in diameter are 

 blasted. 



Ulrfah, Cai. Carl Purdy. 



Correspondence. 



Are Plums and Cherries of one Genus ? 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir, — The question is not raised with any view to a full discus- 

 sion of the subject. If read with due consideration as to the 

 meaning of the word "genus," there will seem little room for 

 discussion at all, for it will readily appear as carrying with it 

 its own negation. Each of the two principal terms of the 

 query, as an English word, is simply and absolutely generic. 

 Each calls to mind a natural group of trees and shrubs, and 

 the two groups are so thoroughly distinct that neither orchard- 

 ists nor botanists have ever in reality confounded them. No 

 one has said that Cherries are only a sort of Plums, or that 

 the Plums are merely so many species or varieties of Cherries. 

 The qualities of the wood, of the bark and of the fruits of the 

 two are so dissimilar, and their natural constitution, as indi- 

 cated by their refusal to hybridize with one another, is so 

 different that no man, learned or unlearned, ever thinks of 

 them as congeneric. Nevertheless, some learned botanical 

 theorists, under the disguise of a Latin nomenclature, have 

 pronounced them to be of one genus. Primus is the Latin 

 equivalent of Plum or Prune, and Cerasus of Cherry, and 

 some authors, dropping Cerasus out of their list of generic 

 names, have named all the Cherry species as species of 

 Prunus. This, in spite of the disguise, may clearly enough 

 be read- as a theoretical endeavor to make Cherries over into 

 Plums, but that this is an artificial, not a natural classifying of 

 these well-known trees is attested by the fact already alluded 

 to, that the simple, every-day intelligence of men, whether 

 botanical or unbotanical, has never regarded the two as con- 

 generic. The trees have been under cultivation with nearly 

 all civilized peoples from ages almost prehistoric, and there is 

 yet no dialect of human speech in which they have but one 

 term in use for these two kinds (genera) of trees. 



It is not my purpose now to name in order those several dis- 

 tinctive peculiarities upon which many of the most eminent 

 botanists, as well as the common judgment of all unbotanical 

 people, have regarded the Plums and the Cherries as generically 

 distinct. But having read, in a somewhat recent issue of this 

 journal (page 180), that the limiting of the genus Prunus to the 

 Plums, and the genus Pyrus to the Pears (excluding the Apples 

 as a separate genus, Malus), is essentially at variance with the 

 views of " most botanists," it has seemed desirable that a few 

 hints of what may be said on the other side of the question 

 should here be given. 



The assertion that most botanists have held Plums and 

 Cherries to be of one genus we judge to have been made with- 

 out forethought ; and only a passing review of leading authors 

 is needed to show it erroneous. Of course we do not in scien- 

 tific matters decide the merits of an opinion by the number of 



names of men who, figuring as scientists, have at one time 

 and another subscribed to it. The greater number of botan- 

 ical authors in every generation are, in so far as their syste- 

 matizing goes, mere disciples of others. Their own opinions 

 upon the limits of genera have no weight ; they have, indeed, 

 no opinions not borrowed. Let us see upon what solid strength 

 of authority one may lean — from what illustrious masters one 

 may have borrowed the opinion when he reiterates it, that the 

 Plums and the Cherries are generically different. The follow- 

 ing could hardly be objected to as a fair list of names of the 

 supereminently original men who have figured prominently 

 in the history of plant classification within the last two cen- 

 turies : Ray, Tournefort, Dillenius, Bcerhaan, Haller, Linnasus, 

 Adanson, Jussieu, Gaertner, Necker, De Candolle, Robert 

 Brown and Salisbury. Only three of these thirteen taught that 

 Plums and Cherries were all of one genus, and they were Lin- 

 naeus, Gaertner and Brown. And I suppose that any well-read 

 botanist of our time, if asked to name the four greatest of these 

 thirteen, would be likely to select Tournefort, Linnaeus, Jus- 

 sieu and Adanson ; and of these Linnaeus alone would stand 

 sponsor for the opinion that Cherries are only another sort of 

 Plums. The doctrine originated with him. And if, coming 

 down to our own day, we find in the majority of compiled 

 floras and small hand-books the Linnasan extension of Primus 

 maintained, it is also true that in the most elaborate recent 

 monographs of this family Prunus and Cerasus are held dis- 

 tinct ; and so are Pyrus and Malus. I need only mention the 

 names of Rcemer, Spach and Decaisne, whose treatises upon 

 these plants, unsurpassed in scholarliness, must be in the 

 hands of all who wish to attain to the fullest understanding 

 of the subject. In America, at least in the western part of it, 

 all our native Cherries were first described — some by Nuttall, 

 others by Sir William Hooker — as species of Cerasus, not as 

 sorts of Plums ; and Asa Gray, in what is, after all, one of the 

 finest monuments remaining to us of his great ability, the 

 " Flora of North America," conforming to that opinion, which 

 has the support of the most splendid array of great names, re- 

 tained Cerasus for the Cherries and Prunus for the Plums, 

 though in more recent works he accepted the unnaturally ex- 

 tended Prunus of Linnaeus. 



But still, everywhere outside the technicalities of the most 

 artificial systematists, it is conceded that Plum and Cherry — 

 Primus and Cerasus — are generically distinct. Whether the 

 lines of demarcation between the two will ever be so strongly 

 drawn in the set terminology of botany as to satisfy the re- 

 quirements of artificial systematists is unimportant. All men, 

 without exception, when speaking in their mother-tongue, and 

 the most weighty authorities upon natural classification in the 

 plant-world, even in their Latin, salute the Plum-trees as one 

 genus, and the Cherry-trees as another. 

 University of California. Edward L. Greene. 



Southern Mississippi Floral Notes. 

 To the Editor of Garden and Forest : 



Sir, — To one new to the south the flora of the Gulf shore of 

 Mississippi is full of interest as early in the season as the first 

 of May. The spring flowers have finished blooming, and 

 Orchids are seen in profusion. Even from the car-window it 

 was evident that lower Mississippi must be the home of the 

 Polygalas. Chapman gives twenty-two species in his flora, 

 and the most showy of them are now in full bloom here. The 

 two most conspicuous are Polygala lutea, sometimes called 

 " Bachelor's Button," with its orange-yellow flowers in dense 

 spikes, scattered everywhere in the grass-land. More than 

 any other plant, this reminds one of the Pine-barrens of New 

 Jersey, where it abounds later in the year. P. nana is less 

 abundant, with beautiful lemon-yellow spikes ; the flower- 

 stalks are very short. Among the other Polygalas now in 

 bloom may be mentioned P. incarnata, P. polygama and P. 

 Chapmanii. Everywhere in the grass beneath the tall, scat- 

 tered, spectral, southern Pine-trees is the showy Phlox divari- 

 cata, with a tint of pink that at first leads one to take it for 

 Calopogon pulchelhis. Both of these plants flourish near each 

 other, the latter in low wet places. 



The two other Orchids most common in the moist places 

 are Pogonia divaricata and its close of kin, P. ophioglossoides, 

 each equally abundant and beautiful after its own type. These 

 boggy places are full of the showy and peculiar leaves of the 

 yellow Pitcher-plant (Sarracenia flava). It is late for blossoms 

 now, but the variegated foliage makes up for any lack of 

 bloom. Two Sundews frequent the same localities, the Dro- 

 sera rotundifolia being sometimes so abundant as to cover the 

 wet sand with a carpet of sticky red leaves. More striking 

 than any other of these glistening fly-catchers is the Drosera 



