The Gardeners' Monthly's article. "Can Plants Sleep for Centuries?" induces me to say a word on the longevity of trees in a dormant state.

I packed a box of 1000 Catalpa trees purposely to test them. The trees were packed in dry moss, box lined with strong paper, the box put in a dry tool house during the summer, a board floor and three windows in a room the size of the house, 16x18 feet with outside door. They were put in this room to give them the most severe trial. Eighteen months after they had been dug we took out 25 trees and planted them; they grew apparently as well as any transplanted trees. Two months later I sent a bunch of them to the Nurserymen's Convention in Chicago last summer, when they had been up and dormant twenty months, and apparently their vitality was intact. Now why not you or some careful scientist bury some dormant trees in a nice dry sandy loam knoll, say 6 or 8 feet deep, where the ground would have just sufficient moisture to keep them from shrivelling and the earth compacted so that water could not reach them, and examine them in fifteen or twenty years ? When you will be about my age, depend on it, you will be just as much interested in experiments as you are now; and especially, you should bury some seeds at the same time; they could not germinate at that depth, and I do not think they would rot.

Try it.

Waukegan, Ills.