THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
to keep them up in their unnatural surroundings when nearly 
every roadside and woodland contains many of our own 
plants that are fully equal in beauty and vastly better fitted 
for life here, but are passed by under the name of weeds? 
Why should many of our invaluable bits of natural scenery 
be continually torn up and "improved" for financial pur- 
poses ? Why should it practically require an armed guard to 
prevent one of our stateliest and most venerable objects of 
national pride, the giant sequoias, in California, from be- 
ing splintered into pickets for grape arbors ? In most cases 
it is because the actual value of the country and of its com- 
mon familiar objects is not known. Our education leads 
awav from the wof>ds and fields and waters, the atmosphere 
of our main occupation, instead of toward them. — Nature 
Study Review. 
The Life-span of Pl.\nts.— The big trees of Califor- 
nia are without doubt, the ver>^ oldest vegetables on our 
planet. The sapling days of many of them date from be- 
fore the Christian era. There are probably few% if any, other 
trees that under the most favorable circumstances would 
live as long. Plants have their old age and death as well as 
animals. It is a curious fact in this connection, that the life 
of many sorts of short-lived plants may be continued indef- 
initely by budding, grafting or layering. Some of our most 
desirable cultivated fruits have arisen from a single sport 
whose good qualities have been perpetuated by such means. 
Thus all the trees of a certain kinds are but so many parts of 
the original sport. In this way, though the individual tree 
may attain maturity and finally die, the life of the original 
is still carried b\' new grafts, and if there should happen to 
be someone at hand to continue the process by buds or 
scions, there seems to be no reason why the strain should 
not live forever. 
