H. M. Engle says he has cross-fertilized the peach with the apricot pollen, and had produced several new varieties, two of which are acquisitions, being highly colored, and of excellent quality."

The above is on the authority of the Boston Cultivator. Mr. Engle gave us a very different account. He cross-fertilized the peach with an apricot, and though the peach perfected fruit under this apricot pollen, there was no other evidence of potency in the apricot pollen. There were no characteristics of the apricot in the progeny. The progeny were simply good, bright colored peaches, and Mr. Engle does not regard them as hybrids of the apricot.

'Nuts for the Scientific to Crack.' - " At a late meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the Secretary read a very interesting letter from the venerable Prof. Jared P. Kirtland of East Roekport, Ohio, giving an account of a curious hybrid between the Western hickory and the black oak. Externally they resemble hickory nuts, in every particular, and on cracking they split longitudinally into two equal parts, exhibiting in place of the usual hickory kernel or meat, perfectly formed acorns of excessively bitter taste, together with well-defined stems, such as attach the acorns to the limbs of the oak. A quart of these hybrid nuts were collected under a hickory tree overspread by a larger black oak, two of which were sent to Dr. Kirtland, and were deposited by him in the cabinet of the Kirtland Natural History Society at Cleveland. Such a hybrid leads one to suspect the possibility of unions which had previously been deemed impossible, and Dr. Kirtland goes into some speculations as to the possible results to horticulture by crossing the apple with the wild crab; the apricot and the plum; the quince and the pear, etc."

The above is from the Boston Cultivator. It is to be regretted that our good friend Dr. Kirtland did not submit his paper to some one who has made hickories a study, before sending it to Boston for publication. As a general rule, the kernel of the walnuts are rough, as everybody knows, - ruminated, as a botanist would say, - but in Carya amara, the bitter-nut hickory, it is very often quite smooth, as in the acorn, and occasionally so in the pig-nut hickory. It is simply an abnormal condition in no way related to hybridism.