8 
THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
does in South x\frica. Its spines seem rather more poisonous than 
those of other species, and there is a popular beUef — based on the 
elasticity of the stem of this plant — that it leaps forward to meet 
the unwary person who' approaches too near to its place of 
growth. It, too, bears a beautiful yellow blossom, though, in 
common with the flowers of most other cacti, it has an unpleasant 
odor. From its stem, when the fiber is dry and hardened, hand- 
some canes are made. Its fruit amounts to little or nothing, being 
too small and filled with seeds to furnish food for anything. 
The flowers of our cacti are as variable as the plants them- 
selves, while their coloring ranges from the purest white to deep 
crimson, the intermediate shades being the most delicate found in 
any known flowers. These flowers produce immense quantities 
of pollen and bees and other like insects gather in numbers on 
cactus beds to collect this food. — Harry H. Dunn, in Los Angeles 
Times. 
PLANT PARTNERSHIPS. 
A true parasite draws its nourishment wholly from the plant to 
which it has attached itself, giving no return except the ungrateful 
one of injuring or killing its host. A true saprophyte is supposed 
to live wholly upon humus or decayed vegetable matter. A true 
symbiot is a plant which has formed a partnership with another 
pktnt or plants ; a partnership of such a nature that the benefits are 
mutual. Now it so happens that there is a striking resemblance 
in habit between certain members of these three classes of organo- 
topic or dependent plants. Certain root-parasites, certain sapro- 
phytes, and certain symbiots are, in fact, so similar in appearance 
that it is not strange they have until lately been placed in the same 
category. Superficially, beech drops and coral root and Indian 
pipe appear to be nearly identical in habit. It has remained for 
that little detective, the microscope, to demonstrate that they are 
entirely different in their relations to the plant world and in their 
mode of obtaining subsistence. The first, beech drops, is a true 
^parasite, and, like the lower fungi, subsists entirely upon its host; 
•the second, coral-root, so far as present knowledge goes, lives, like 
the fleshy fungi, on decayed vegetable matter, and may therefore 
