7 o 
THE PLANT WORLD. 
which has been translated into English and enlarged by Professor 
F. W. Oliver. Unfortunately this work which we know as the 
“ Natural History of Plants,” is not accurate in all particulars 
and must be taken cum grand salis. We should always regard 
with suspicion any treatise which never fails to explain glibly any 
phenomenon of nature which comes up. 
(To be continued.) 
FASCIATION IN FIELD PEAS* 
By Frederick H. Blodgett, 
Maryland Agricultural College. 
The use of seed or other material of variable character is 
attended by more or less risk of loss due to impurities and other 
forms of depreciation more or less beyond the control of the user 
of the material purchased. When the defect in quality takes the 
form of “ rogues ” the loss is evident even to those who would 
not recognize the source of loss in an excess of weeds or decreased 
crop as due directly to the unwillingness to pay for good seed. 
Under conditions unusually favorable to vegetative growth, plants 
often produce excessive or abnormal parts, or assume freak forms. 
This happens quite often with the sweet potato, and with other 
plants at intervals. In 1903 two fields, of a total of fifteen acres 
or more, were observed in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, 
devoted to growing peas for canneries, in which the loss due to 
poor seed was almost total, as there was less than ten per cent, 
of a crop set, and practically none of this was harvested. 
In the truck region of Maryland about Baltimore, it is cus¬ 
tomary to go over the field of peas several times, taking each 
time the mature pods only, and finally turning under the vines as 
green manure. Very little stock is kept by the farmers of the 
region, hence the vines are not cut and fed as is the case in the 
western part of the state. Any failure to set a crop of pods there- 
* Read at the Philadelphia meeting, American Association for the Ad¬ 
vancement of Science, Section G, December 27-28, 1904. 
