THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
123 
the year when most convenient, but when expired subscrip- 
tions extend beyond this time, we find it necessary to send 
them to a collecting agency for investigation. Sometimes the 
only way we have of discovering that a subscriber is dead, 
is by asking the agency to look him up. We trust that none 
of our subscribers in arrears are dead, but if not, we also 
trust that we shall hear from them. We can say truthfully 
that thus far we have not lost a single subscriber by death, 
whose subscription was paid in advance. As a mere matter 
of precaution, we suggest that those in arrears pay up. 
^ * * 
As the single numbers of this magazine come to hand, 
readers may fail to appreciate the amount of valuable in- 
formation they are getting for a dollar, but take up the year's 
numbers, and you will find you have a larger volume on 
plants than can be bought elsewhere for a dollar. It takes 
time to make the value of the magazine apparent. We know 
this because we sell more back numbers to old subscribers 
than we do to new ones. After they have been reading the 
magazine a while they seldom fail to order the volumes they do 
not have. If you doubt that the back numbers are still of 
interest, take another look at any of them. There are a lot 
of things there that you had forgotten already, we will venture. 
* * * 
Clumsy man will apparently never relax his efforts to 
"gild the lily and adorn the rose." Almost every attempt 
he has made to improve upon nature in the matter of flowers 
has been directed toward the mere addition of more flaunting 
colors. The chrysanthemum has been ''improved" from a 
beautiful daisy-like flower to an ugly mop of yellow, pink 
or white strings as big as a cabbage. A tissue-paper imi- 
tation has quite as much claim to our admiration. There are, 
to be sure, certain flowers whose shapes lend themselves more 
readily to the florist's art than others, and of these the rose 
