16 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
The £oliag-e is so elm-like that people who go to the woods 
for their shade trees often dig up the hackberry for the 
elm by mistake. In the East the hackberry appears seldom 
to attain great size, but in the Middle West trees eighteen 
inches or more in diameter are common. 
The Wizard of Horticulture. — This magazine 
does not usually publish poetry, even if paid for at advertis- 
ing rates, but so many astounding things have been claimed 
for Burbank in the daily press, that we are tempted to 
quote the following from Gardening : 
O, Mr. Burbank, won't you try to do some things for me? 
A wizard clever as you are can do them easily. 
A man who turns a cactus plant into a feather-bed 
Should have no trouble putting brains into a cabbage head. 
CoRREL.\TiON OF CoLOR. — It is a curious result of the 
correlation of color that red flowers should almost invariably 
have black seeds. Thus when one is planting mixed seeds 
of a garden variety having flowers of more than one color, 
he may select out the red-flowered sorts by the color of their 
seeds. Black seeds themselves have the red coloring, an- 
The Mullein in the West.— In the October Note 
and Comment I saw a note in regard to mullein in the 
West. I have never seen the plant in Southern California, 
but on a recent trip through the old mining region about 
Placerville I observ-ed it frequently. I noticed occasional 
plants by the roadside, but its favorite place of growth 
seemed to be hillside clearings in the pine forest, especially 
where brash had been burned recently. The plants were 
of medium height, and did not seem to mind the prolonged 
summer drought in the least. I did not notice any plants be- 
low^ fifteen hundred feet elevation, but above that they seem 
to be slowly spreading. As near as I could learn from old 
