THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
59 
well-known sassafras. The bark of branches and twigs is of the 
same yellow-green hue and has a taste and smell not very different 
from sassafras. No doubt if a person familiar with the taste of 
sassafras were given a piece of camphor bark to chew without 
knowing what it was, he would call it sassafras. The leaves of 
the camphor tree are small, rather oblong and pointed, much more 
like the conventional laurel leaf. Readers need scarcely be told 
that both these species are true laurels and in no way closely re- 
lated to the rhododendrons and kalmias. 
Prolonging the life of Individual Blossoms. — A flower is 
simply a means to an end — the plant's device for setting a new 
crop of seeds. So persistently do the plants obey the natural law 
to be fruitful, that simply removing the flowers as they fade will 
often cause a species to continue longer in bloom. Similarly when 
pollenation is in any way prevented, the blooms remain upon the 
plant for a much longer time than usual, waiting in the hope of re- 
ceiving pollen. Apropos of this a writer in Park's Floral Mag- 
azine, relates that by removing the pistils from tulips, the flowers 
remained a much longer time unwithered. This subject is one 
upon which more light might conveniently be shed, and is recom- 
mended to any botanist with leisure. Some of our native wild 
flowers with good sized pistils would be best for experiment. It 
would be \Q:vy interesting to know how much longer flowers from 
which the pistils have been removed remain open than the flowers 
not subjected to this treatment, but who knows how long the 
flowers of a single species usually remain open ? 
Xew Botanical Terms. — Little by little the way of the botan- 
izer through modern literature is being made harder by the adop- 
tion of new ways of calling old things. In the Ohio Naturalist 
for March, Professor Schaffner proposes several unfamiliar terms. 
Any specialized part of a branch which bears the sexual organs 
(usually pollen and embryo seeds) should, he says, be called a 
gametophore, and that the gametophores may be either antheridio- 
phores, archegoniophores, or oogoniophores. In the new botany, 
however, ''the flower is a modified spore-bearing branch without 
