64 
EIGHTH REPORT. 
SOME BOTANICAL ERRORS FOUND IN AGRICULTURAL AND 
CHEMICAL TEXT BOOKS. 
W. J. BEAL. 
Everv once in a while I find that I have been making some errors 
in teaching Botany. I am not alone in these respects, for I find many 
errors in books that treat of botanical topics. I can now recall many 
errors taught me in zoology and botany by the distinguished men, Louis 
Agassiz and Asa Gray of Harvard. How much more difficult it must 
be for a teacher or writer of books to be always right when he under¬ 
takes to cover two or three departments of science, such as botany 
and chemistry, or botany and agriculture. Botany, as we now know 
it, is a science that is comparatively young, and during the last twenty 
years has grown with astonishing rapidity. To show the folly of one 
man’s undertaking to cover a broad field in science, I will give one il¬ 
lustration. 
In 1873 was published in New York a translation of a book, entitled 
“The Universe,” by F. A. Pouchet, M. D., with an introduction by 
Arnold Guyot, Ph.'D., of Princeton, N. J. I make a single quotation: 
“In the marshy forests of Southern America, Providence has intrusted 
this task to another distilling plant, the Purple Sarracenia, the struc¬ 
ture of which is no less eccentric. Its leaves, uniting at their edges, 
are transformed into elegant amphorae, the narrow opening of which 
is surmounted by an ample green auricle decorated with scarlet red 
veins, to which the species owes its names. These cups, present from 
the empire of Flora, and which rise from spot to spot at the feet of 
the traveller, are filled with pure and delicious water, for the benefit 
of which he is all the more grateful that he is encircled by nothing but 
marshes, the water of which is lukewarm and nauseous.” 
This is our common pitcher plant of the bogs. The fact is, the water 
in these pitchers abounds in rotten insects and worms, which no one 
would ever think of drinking. The author attempted to cover too much 
ground, and of course failed in the attempt. 
Under the heading as given on our program, I shall give a few illu¬ 
strations as found in the writings of four authors,—not by any means 
all the errors that could be found. 
“Agriculture,” by Dr. William P. Brooks, of Massachuetts Agricul¬ 
tural College, is a ’recent publication. For an illustration of the flower 
of wheat, he speaks, on page 397, of “the feathery pistil,” where he 
should say feathery stigma, and on page 421, “the seeds of orchard grass 
and those of rye grass look much alike, and as the rye seed can be much 
more cheaply grown than that of orchard grass, it is sometimes mixed 
with the latter.” He probably had in mind the fact that the seeds of 
meadow fescue resemble, not those of orchard grass, but those of rye 
grass. On page 502, he speaks of great variations in the yield of pota- 
