Cause Of Summer Thunder Showers

Sohneke states that the electricity which is discharged during a thunderstorm is produced by the friction of water and ice; that is, that the ice is electrified by friction of water. Just before a thunder-storm water-clouds (cumuli), and ice-clouds (cirri, cirrostrati), appear simultaneously in the sky. The friction of these particles of ice and water is a sufficient cause of the electricity which is generated. - Independent.

Age Of Bearing Of A Coffee Plant

Where the conditions suit, the coffee tree is not many years in coming into bearing. Near Lake Nyanza in Central Africa from one plant set out eight years ago, there were produced last year seventy bags of the finest coffee.

Rubus Trivialis - The Southern Dewberry

This is the name of the pretty blackberry received from a Savannah, Ga., correspondent, who says: " I send you specimens of blackberry blooms, you will see they are purplish, or rose-colored, a quite common thing about here; and I am told it is so every season - they are quite showy with their suffusions of roseate and pinkish flowers".

It is a remarkably ornamental plant and deserves cultivation in Northern gardens, where it would make a very pretty trellis plant.

Those Ugly Weeds

Lucy Larcom says in Flowers of the Fallow:

"1 like those plants that you call weeds,

Sedge, hardhack, muilin, yarrow. That knit their roots and sift their seeds "Where any grassy wheel-track leads

Through country by-ways narrow. They fringe the rugged hillside farms

Grown old with cultivation, With such wild wealth of rustic charms As bloomed in Nature's matron arms

The first days of creation".

Common Names Of Houstonia Ccerulea

By a ticket to an old specimen in the herbarium of the Academy of Natural Sciences, of Philadelphia, it appears that the early common name about Philadelphia was Quaker Girls. This has been changed in modern times to Quaker Bonnets. In other places it goes by the name of Bluetts.

Fancher Creek Nursery, Near Fresno, California

Mr. Gustav Eisen, who with his superior intelligence and energy has made this nursery world-renowned, retires from its management. Mr. F. Roeding is the new proprietor.

Senator Mitchell, Of Wisconsin

This gentleman, whose death is just announced, was a munificent patron of horticulture. His residence at Milwaukee, when the Editor saw it some years ago, had around it extensive ranges of glass for fruit and flower culture, and must have been among the earliest in the west on this beautiful and princely scale.