73 
send living insects especially those that bore in plants or live in 
earth. They should be supplied with food but no provision need, 
as a rule, be made for air. In every case a specimen showing the 
damage done should be sent. When possible living insects, on or 
in their food plant, should be forwarded and if there is risk of the 
insects dying a few should also be sent preserved. 
hull particulars should accompany every specimen, such as : — - 
.Mature and extent of damage, time of its appearance, previous 
conditions of the plant attacked, the name of the plant, the locality 
and every fact that may be known of the pest in question. Great 
care should he taken to make the specimens fully representative 
of the insect and its work, and to ensure their arrival in good 
condition. 
ELEMENTARY NOTES ON THE PROPAGATION 
OF PLANTS. 
By C. Curtis, f. l. s. 
Dame Nature’s principal method of propagating plants is by 
means of seeds, but as she does not, as a rule, succeed in raising 
one ten-thousandth part of her progeny her methods cannot be 
blindly adopted by the planter or forester whose aim is to produce 
a large number of plants of a given kind in a short space of time. 
In nurseries and places where large numbers of plants are pro- 
duced for sale numerous methods, some of them exceedingly clever 
and known to but few, arc adopted for multiplying what are 
termed difficult subjects. Fortunately the commercial products 
with which planters in this region are at present mainly concerned 
do not offer any special difficulties in the matter of propagation 
and therefore one or other of the means herein mentioned will 
generally meet the case. 
The most general methods in use, and one or other of which 
succeeds with the majority of plants, are seeds, cuttings, grafts, 
buds, layers, division; and what for want of a better name is 
known as marcottage. The latter is what is generally spoken of 
here as grafting and is the method principally adopted by natives 
to increase any good variety of fruit or flower. It is both in prin- 
ciple and practice different from grafting and its main advantages 
are the production of fruit in less time than if grown from seed, 
and the certainty of perpetuating exactly what is desired. The 
latter is also one of the objects of grafting proper, but there are 
also other reasons for grafting one of the principal being to induce 
more vigorous growth by placing the graft on a stock with a better 
constitution or more adapted to the climate. 
Seeds. 
There are few kinds of trees or shrubs that do not at some time 
or other produce seeds, though it may not be until they have at- 
tained considerable age, and the intervals between the seed-bearing 
Ifrz 
