THE AQUARIUM. 

CONDUCTED BY HUGO MULERTT. 
[The Editor of this Department will cheerfully answer all queries relative to the conduct of Aquaria. ] 
The Sagittaria or Arrowhead. 
In the great economy of Nature the sagittana have contrib- 
uted their full share to the support of the human family in all 
parts of the world. The Chinese and Japanese cultivate them 
very extensively for food, also the Tartar Kalmucks use them 
for food. Aquatic birds are fond of them, and resort to favor- 
ite spots in spring to feast upon the tubers, when the Indians 
slay the birds for their own feasts. The tubers are generally 
as large as hens’ eggs, and are greatly relished when raw, but 
have a bitter, milky juice, not agreeable to civilized man ; this 
is destroyed in boiling, however, and the roots are rendered 
sweet and palatable. They are considered excellent when 
cooked with meat, either salt or fresh. To collect the roots 
the Indians wade into the water and loosen them with their 
feet, when they float up and are gathered. They are of an 
oblong shape, in color whitish yellow, banded with four black 
rings (U. S. Agr. Rept., 1870). They serve as food for the 
Indians of Washington, under the name of Wappatoo. In 
shallow ponds and muddy margins of lakes and rivers through- 
out the Northwest this plant,°so variable in foliage and so 
abundant in distribution, furnishes an important article of na- 
tive food in the tubers which beset its fibrous roots. These 
tubers, from: the fact of their affording nourishment to the 
larger aquatic fowls which congregate in such abundance about 
the Northwestern lakes, are called by the Chippewas Wab-er- 
i-pin-ig or swan potatoes, a name which has been naturally 
appropriated to several streamsin that region. Wabesipinicon, 
meaning the abode of the swan potato (Owens’ Survey of the 
N. W.). 
From the foregoing extracts it will be seen how universally 
they have been employed to assist in the maintenance of the 
human family, and probably we know very little yet how ex- 
tensively they have been employed in North America. 
We have collected them from a great many localities in 
Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and find in early spring a solid, 
brittle, tuberous corm, down deep in the earth, being the germ 
from which the plant starts in spring. From the corm, at the 
first approach of warm weather, starts a large, porous root- 
stock, reaching up to near the surface of the earth, and there 
throws out innumerable fibrous roots, which is the true crown 
from which spring the leaves, flowers and stolens, and is also 
the plant centre during summer. By the rst of June the milky 
juice (starch or saccharine, etc.) has usually been absorbed by 
the new growth of the plant, and the corm is then a soft and 
flexible, or spongy mass, reminding one of a sprouted and 
growing potato, while by the middle of July or 1st of August 
we would not find any corm, but found decayed masses which 
we were reasonably certain were the remains of the former 
corms. 
In addition to tuberous and fibrous roots, the sagittaria pre- 
sent the feature of producing sto/ens or long, creeping roots, 
just below the surface of the earth. They start from the stem, 
and usually from just above the fibrous roots, and creep out 
horizontally from the plant in all directions. We do not now 
recall a single genus of plants that present so many different 
torms of developent in each plant as the sagittaria. First, the 
roots are of three entirely distinct forms, the tuberous, fibrous 
and stoleniferous. Next, the leaves are sometimes phyllodia 
(submerged and riband-like), others are an elliptical, erect 
blade, upon a tall, round, or shghtly angular stem, and lastly, 
the leaf developed into its true form—arrow-shaped. Again, 
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THE SAGITTARIA. 
let us look at the flower; the lower ones are usually fertile, 
producing seed to perpetuate its kind, while the upper ones are 
sterile and barren, or each flower stock producing flowers with 
the sexes separate and still on the same stock. 
The flowers are borne on long, leafless, branched stems, 
well above the foliage, with pure white petals and a yellow 
centre (stamens), usually single, but occasionally S. sagittae- 
folia and S. variabilis, var. latifolia, have been found growing 
wild with double flowers. European nurserymen offer these 
varieties now for sale. 
Sagittaria natans and S. lanciclata soon became favorites 
