474 
(2) It may be possible that the excrement of the mites 
contains poisonous compounds, which would be 
injurious, if the powdery excrement were 
cooked with the rice. 
L. A. B. 
THE CULTIVATED CROTALARIA. 
The Crotalaria now so extensively cultivated as a 
green-soiling plant in the Malay Peninsula, under the name 
of Crotalaria striata , Dec., has a very different appearance 
from the coinmop. wild plant so common in Coconut estates 
and waste sandy places generally near the sea. It is al- 
together a much stouter plant and much more branched. 
The leaves are larger and deeper green, and the pods con- 
tain over forty seeds each instead of the usual twenty- 
five or thereabouts of our local plant. This cultivated 
form apparently keeps quite true, and the wild form the 
true C. striata does not under cultivation along side of it 
show any signs of turning into the cultivated form. What 
I have called the cultivated form was obtained from Ceylon, 
where the true slender C. striata grows also. In Trimen’s 
flora of Ceylon, a variety from Kandy is described under 
the name of variety acutifolia with “Leaflets larger acute, 
pods larger with more numerous seeds.” This fits the 
Ceylon plant as cultivated here except that the leaflets can 
be hardly said to be acute , but they seem to have a longer 
mucro or little spike at the end of the leaf, otherwise the 
description suits the plant. Its stouter and more robust 
habit and larger foliage make it a very much better plant 
for cultivation than is the wild plant. It seems too to be 
less liable to the attacks of the little pea- weevil which often 
destroys all the seeds in the pods of the wild plant, but of 
this one cannot yet be certain. , 
If not the exact form intended by Dr. Trimen under his 
var. acutifolia, it might be termed var. robusta . 
It may be noticed by planters that the bark of the plant 
peels off very readily and is tough enough to make a good 
string, and this fibre 'is used for this purpose by some of the 
natives of India. 
AN AMERICAN VIEW OF AGRICULTURAL 
EXHIBITIONS. 
Here and there we meet with people who hold the 
opinion that the Agri-Horticultural Shows, held so success- 
