"I read that you have snows in northern California this winter two to sixty feet deep. How is this ? I have always understood that there is little difference between the winter temperature, of northern and southern California, and that snow seldom fell." So writes a correspondent; she had been rightly informed as to California's winter temperature north, for there it is only two degrees colder, in the extreme, at Redding, away north in Shasta county, than at Riverside, away south in San Bernardino county ; and the same is true throughout the state in all the valley and foothill regions. The snows, deep snows, are in the high mountains above 6,000 feet, and there would be exactly as great a depth of snow on the high mountains of the south part of the state as north, if the rainfall south was the same. The extremes of winter cold are nearly exactly the same at Riverside as they are in the great interior valleys of the northern and central portions of the state, and greater than they are here in the valleys of the coast region ; yet the mean (average) is a little lower here and north, because in the interior and drier south they have more bright days when the sun gets in his work.

Everywhere in the foot-hills, 200 to 1,000 feet above the floors of the valleys, it is warmer than in the low valleys, and the extremes and fluctuations are not so great. On these hills, not in or between them, in the narrow valleys, are the healthiest homes to be found on this continent, for man, beast, or plant; yet but very few homes are now seen on the hills, for the reason that it is generally expensive to bring water to such homes. Snow has not actually fallen here in Pe-taluma this winter, though it has been colder than the average. We did have snow, hail and rain mixed, enough one day to whiten the ground for a short time, yet there were many days when the snow reached down the mountain sides within 600 feet of the valley floor. Sonoma mountain, seven miles (its summit) to the east of us, is 2,400 feet high, while Mt. St. Helena, 35 miles away, had her snow-white cape on nearly all winter, at times robed in a bridal dress of spotless white. The old lady is nearly 6,060 feet tall. But when we come to climb the great Sierras, with a precipitation of 80 to 120 inches of water, such winters as this last one mostly in the form of "the beautiful," there is at times rather too much snow for comfort in traveling, especially railroading.

One fellow reported the depth of the snow up there as being 60 feet over the tops of the telegraph poles, and snowing fast at the time! It is a queer country; a man can grow as fine oranges as ever grew, and from the center of his orange grove see great banks of snow every day in the year, when the thermometer at his side is showing 1150 of heat! - D. B. Wier, Petaluma, California.

The Harvard Summer School of Botany, a well known teacher's course, is to be conducted by Mr. W. F. Ganong, and will open June 15. A summer class in cryptogamic botany will be conducted by Mr. A. B. Seymour, who will give special attention to "agricultural botanists".