For the plants we must take stock in, we need legal denominations as exact as we have for money, and as current wherever we travel. The farmer, gardener, writer or statesman in debate who cannot give the systematic names of the plants he uses is practically dumb in this generation.

Likewise the botanist or teacher of agriculture and gardening who cannot name useful plants by their appearances dwarfed in the sod, is not equipped by his schooling for the ordinary arts of life. Some of our grass books - Low's "British Grasses," to wit - have double columns of botanic synonyms, that so far as our new prints are concerned, should be tied, neck and heels, with our mobs of local aliases, and deliberately forgotten as useless lumber.

Have I intimated that farmers are suffering more than other classes in the dearth of means for communicating ideas respecting our common grasses ? Let me correct the impression, for the whole country is waiting for our experiment stations to do something about it. Some deny the state right to go blundering, and assert that the Department of Agriculture should lead us. Every agricultural editor and writer is waiting for somebody to find out about •* grass." Within three months the polite world will be tearing its hair and discharging gardeners in vexation at the annual grass that is ruining its lawns.*

When Chairman Hatch, of the House Agricultural Committee, put his thumbs and fingers instructively together before him and said : "I suppose you know, Mr. Tarryer, that there are two kinds of "blue grass' - I had to interject, hastily, in dread of a quarrel, for there were very positive gentlemen from widely different sections of the United States in the committee-room - "Yes, sir - there are three, and five - and" - dropping my voice to a whisper "seven kinds of blue grass in some agricultural circles - that's what's the matter, sir."Luckily Mr. Hatch took the hint and dropped the subject.

Some politicians fancy it is all their official life is worth to mention the right name of a grass now, in a farmer's meeting. Perhaps it would be for some of them. Uncle Jerry Rusk has a good story he likes to tell about some municipal embankments he had turfed with a grass that held on while the other fellows'banks (who laughed at him), "went down, sir ! - went down !" But he was stuck in naming the variety till one suggested "the kind that grows through potatoes ?"† "That's it" - said he.

Systematic names go easier in journalism because writers are not by when the average editor - galled by old blunders he had no means of detecting - winces. But there is no need to be timorous about using the simple Latin name for a grass when we are sure we are right. Let us have the courage *Panicum sanguinale, probably. - Ed.] †A, repens, no doubt. - Ed] to call a spade a spade, and not call a mattock a "grub," nor a small variety of oak or pine a "scrub," instead of a shrub - as though we had learned our English of somebody's coachman instead of our fathers and mothers.

In private conversation, when it comes to grass-names, we must do the best we can to be agreeable, of course. But in public let it be understood that Phelum* is shorter and easier to speak, besides being older, more exact, unmistakable, and of far wider currency than any other name for the same thing. So is † Dactylis - likewise $ odoratum. More and more people would be using these and other scientific terms if writers and speakers would not go crawling after vulgarities that else would soon be forgotten. Nobody, black or white, will sit in a negro pew, or ride in a second-class car if they can help it. Why not take first-class names ? And for naturalists to deal in nick-names when they have the world's proper names for things at their tongue's end, looks as if they were hedging the people out from their craft instead of inviting them in like liberally educated and liberal men.

In a former number of the Garden a Paris correspondent saw some fine turf grass he admired in the skirts of the city, but he didn't tell what it was, and so lost one chance to please Mrs. Tarryer and interest thousands of people who are inquiring.

Years ago, while Mr. Meehan was conducting the famous controversy among orchardists about the propriety of growing grass under fruit-trees, my feeling was that both sides might be in the right if only the grasses they favored or objected to were named. The discussion led to no economic common-sense because "grass" in those times may have included all the legumes as well as grains that could be grown in an orchard. Had anyone given the names of grasses in the disputes-discriminating between such dwarfs as Poa annua and trivalis, and a deep-rooted thing like D. glomerata, saying the weak turf of the former could do the trees no harm while making the ground tidy and keeping fallen fruit out of the dirt; but that the latter on thin soils must rob trees of moisure and fertility, then the question of grass under fruit-trees would not be so unsettled to-day, and we should be farther along in the names and individual uses of our common grasses. New names of plants, like those of new states, towns, postoffices and young babies are to be expected, and will affect only those who meet with the things the names apply to.

[*Herd's-grass or Timothy. † Orchard grass, or Rough Cock's-foot. $ Sweet Vernal grass. - Ed].