There are seasons when some of the common

flowers escape us. Catkins, except those of the willows, seem to be unusually scarce this year. Of the four birches found here, the yellow, the black, the paper and the gray, I have found those of the last only, and these in very small quantity, where in other years all of them. were very abundant. The same may be said of some other trees. All of them are somewhat behind the usual time of flowering, so that the above dates can hardly be regarded as the average ones, but should be a week or ten days earlier.

It will be noticed that eighteen of the fifty are trees

or shrubs.

Among the rarer forms in this immediate

The

neighborhood is the red-berried elder (Sambucus racemosa, L.), although in the rocky gorge of Purgatory, a dozen miles away, it is one of the most abundant shrubs. Another is the wild gooseberry (Ribes oxyacanthoides, L.), of which I can find but one or two shrubs. American hornbeam (Carpinus Caroliniana, Walter) and the hop-hornbeam (Ostrya Virginica, Willd.) are small, handsome trees. The smooth, fluted trunk of the former is an interesting object to a person curious in forest history. Its fruit is unlike any other. Its foliage somewhat resembles that of a birch. The foliage of the hop-hornbeam also resembles that of the black birch, and its fruit has a resemblance to that of the hop. Neither of these is as well known as it deserves to be. The dark knobs that now stud the white ash disclose one of our most valuable forest trees.

These apparently withered stems in the grass by

the roadside are the fertile stems of the common horsetail (Equisetum arvense, L.), the spores of which are interesting microscopic objects, illustrating finely the influence of moisture on the attached filaments. Goldthread and early meadow-rue and the sedges and bellwort and Solomon's seal and celandine and cranesbill, each and all seem to be needed to complete the charm of the month. If we look at them with appreciative eye, they will give us a keener enjoyment of Life.

THE FLOWERS OF EARLY JUNE. I.

O month whose promise and fulfilment blend
And burst in one! it seems the earth can store
In all her roomy house no treasure more;
Of all her wealth no farthing have to spend

On fruit, when once this stintless flowering end.
And yet no tiniest flower shall fall before

It hath made ready at its hidden core

Its tithe of seed, which we may count and tend
Till harvest.

- HELEN JACKSON —June.

It is one of the rewards which impartial Nature bestows upon her faithful students that their eyes are opened to see the order, and their ears to hear the harmony, and their minds to perceive the beauty, which pervade the universe. To them alone "the music of the spheres" is audible; to them alone "the open secret" of Life is revealed. And yet, Nature, however kindly, does not bestow all her gifts upon any one of her followers however faithful. Often the light of new truth appears to dawn on several watchers at once, just as the early morning light dawns upon all who are awake to see it.

The independent discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846 by Adams and Leverrier by means of the disturbance it produces in the movements of Uranus will always be regarded as one of the most interesting events in the history of astronomy. Equal honors were justly awarded to both in 1848 by the council of the Royal Astronomical Society. Newton and Leibnitz were working simultaneously on mathematical theories which led to the invention of the differential calculus. We may now forget the long and bitter controversy which followed to determine to which of the two belongs the right of claiming priority in this invention.

While Darwin, by the advice of Lyell, was writing out his views on the tendency in organic beings descended from the same stock to diverge in character as they become modified, views afterwards embodied in his "The Origin of Species," Wallace, who was then in the Malay Archipelago making his famous researches, sent him an essay "On the tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type," containing exactly the same views as his own. The modesty of both allowed no question of priority to disturb their friendship and respect for each other. The 14th of February, 1876, must be memorable in the records of the United States Patent Office as the day on which Elisha Gray filed a caveat in regard to his own invention, and Alexander

Graham Bell filed a specification and drawings of the original Bell telephone.

Professor Asa Gray, writing of what is generally called Metamorphosis of Plants, says: "The adopted theory supposes that stamens and pistils, as well as sepals and petals, are homologous with leaves; that the sepals are comparatively little, the petals more, and the reproductive organs much modified from the type, that is, from the leaf of vegetation. This is simply what is meant by the proposition that all these organs are transformed or metamorphosed leaves. What would have been leaves, if the development had gone on as a vegetative branch, have in the blossom developed in other forms, adapted to other functions. Linnæus expressed this idea, along with other more speculative conceptions, dimly apprehended, by the phrase Vegetable Metamorphosis. Not long afterwards, this fecund idea of a common type, the leaf, of which the parts of the flower were regarded as modifications, was more clearly and differently developed by a philosophical physiologist, Caspar Frederic Wolff. Thirty years later it was again and wholly independently developed by Goethe, in a long-neglected but now well-known essay on the Metamorphoses of Plants. Twenty-three years afterwards, similar ideas were again independently propounded by DeCandolle, from a different theoretical point of view."