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Wanted. — Short notes of interest to the general bot- 
anist are always in demand for this department. Our 
readers are invited to make this the place of publication 
for their botanical items. 
A Bee-plant for Sterile Soils.— When the Chicago 
drainage channel was dug, the material excavated formed 
a ridge nearly forty miles long and from fifty to a hundred 
feet high. Few plants grow upon these great piles of 
rock, but the sweet clover seems to find some parts a 
congenial home and thrives in spite of the dryness. An 
enterprising individual has recently begun fostering the 
spread of this plant for the honey it affords his bees. In 
the vicinity of the drainage channel there are hundreds of 
acres of sterile soil which may ultimately be turned into 
pasturage for bees and thus be made to yield a return not 
inferior to that from better land planted to field crops. 
Sex of Indian Turnip. — Readers of this magazine need 
hardly be told that the inflorescence of the Indian turnip 
or Jack-in-the -pulpit {Arissema triphyllum) is not a single 
flower, but a number of flowers clustered at the base of a 
thick spadix and surrounded by a colored bract or spathe, 
but possibly some do not know that these small and 
inconspicuous flowers are likely to be of two sorts — stam- 
inate and pistillate — and that while some flower clusters 
may have both pistillate and staminate blossoms, the 
majority are usually of one sex. It has often been stated 
that the sex of the plants can be determined by the color 
of the spathe, those with the deepest color being pistillate 
and the others staminate. An examination of a series of 
plants, however, will show that this rule has many ex- 
ceptions. The real distinction seems to be due to the 
general rule among plants that in species of two sexes, the 
more robust specimens are likeh^to be pistillate or female^ 
and the weaklings to be staminate or male. 
