ing it to be a law of the vegetable kingdom has the remotest bear- 

 ing upon the question. If such hasty conclusions as these, wildly 

 jumped at from no data, are to be allowed under the name of 

 Science, her students will richly deserve all the ridicule and sar- 

 casm which a certain class are so fond of pouring upon them. — 

 Chas. R. Dryer, Phelps, Ontario County, JV. Y., May 12, 1875. 



Coreopsis discoidea spontaneous in Connecticut. — Ad- 

 joining our cow-pasture is a piece of woodland of about four 

 acres, with beech, birch, chestnut, oaks, etc., growing on it. It 

 is level but has several depressions which form shallow ponds 

 containing water most of the year. In one of these, about a hun- 

 dred paces in circuit, grow button-bush, wild-rose sedges, cotton- 

 grass, sphagnum, grasses, at least three species of Bidens or 

 beggar-ticks and Coreopsis discoidea. I gathered flowers of the last 

 when just coming into blossom, supposing it to be the common 

 beggar-ticks, at the same time noticing its slender, delicate habit, 

 so unlike the coarse weed of our fields. But, on examining the 

 young ovaries, I could see no sign of the retrorse bristles on their 

 awns, which the achenia of Bidens should have. I thought this 

 might be owing to their immature state. Moreover, on comparing 

 it with Coreopsis, I found it to agree with C. discoidea in every- 

 thing except the reflexed outer involucre which an old edition of 

 Prof. Gray's Botany assigned to it. I sent a bit of it to him and 

 he pronounced it C. discoidea. 



Just after this, I found, in the same place, a plant, very much 

 like the former ones, which had unmistakably the achenia of Bi- 

 dens frondosa, the ciliated outer involucral leaflets of the same, the 

 flower heads just perceptibly larger than those of the Coreopsis, 

 and the same delicate growth of the latter. 



In the last edition of Prof. Gray's manual, he gives as one 

 character of the subsection * * * * "scales of the outer involu- 

 cre reflexed or spreading" without indicating to which of the four 

 species the reflexed involucre belongs. I did not observe any such 

 in the plants I gathered. The awns did not seem to me "stout" 

 and they were merely hispid rather than "upwardly barbed." — 

 Charles Wright, Wethersjkld, Conn. 



Fertilization of Alpine Flowers bt Butterflies. — In the 

 ninth of a series of valuable papers communicated by Hermann 

 Muller, to "Nature," on the fertilization* of flowers by insects, he 



