NOTES AND ABSTRACTS. 



625 



from Central America to Texas has been that the natural sequence of 

 vegetative and flowering branches is interfered with, the plants becom- 

 ing large leafy bushes with many sterile limbs, but with very few 

 fruiting branches or none at all. A gradual return of the plants to 

 their normal habits of branching has marked the process of acclima- 

 tization. 



The two sorts of branches of the Banana plant are described as (1) 

 sword suckers and (2) broad-leaved suckers, and a table is added giving 

 a summary of the classification of branches in the four woody plants 

 here considered under the following heads : — 



1. Origin : 



Natal buds. ■ ' 



Adventitious buds. 



2. Position: 



Axillary. 



Adaxillary. 



Extra-axillary. 



3. Eeproductive Function : ' 



Fertile. 

 Sterile. 



4. Vegetative Function : 



Able to form main stems. 



Not able to form main stems. — i¥. L. H. 



Elliottia racemosa. By A. 0. (Gard., Sept. 30, 1911, p. 472).— 

 This extremely rare shrub, beside being of interest botanically, 

 is of considerable decorative value, and it flowers at the end of July 

 and early August, when flowering shrubs are by no means common. 

 It is a monotypic genus, named after Stephen Elliott, who dis- 

 covered it growing wild in Georgia at the beginning of the last century. 

 There are two plants at Kew growing in a bed of heather, and these 

 are believed to be the only ones in Europe. They have been there 

 since 1902, but they flowered this year for the first time. The plant 

 forms an upright pyramidal shrub and is quite hardy at Kew. The 

 flowers are pure white, 1 inch across, borne in erect terminal racemes 

 6 to 8 inches in length, bearing forty to eighty flowers, but not more 

 than a quarter of these are open together. A successful means of. 

 propagation is yet tO' be found; though artificial pollination has been 

 tried and bees have been attracted to the flowers in large numbers, 

 no fruits have been obtained. — H. R. D. 



Experimental Error of Field Trials. By W. H. Mercer and 

 [ A. D. Hall {Jour. Agr. Sci., iv., pt. 2, pp. 107-132; Oct. 1911).— The 

 'f authors discuss the amount of error to be expected in any trials of crops 

 and the method of reducing it to the smallest possible size, recom- 

 mending the use of several plots of small area instead of a smaller 

 number of large plots. — F. J. G. 



VOL. XXX VII, ; . s s 



