In anticipation of the consolidation of this magazine with _The American
Botanist_ at the end of the year, some very extensive improvements in
the new magazine are to be made. Among the more important are a better
grade of paper, the use of numerous illustrations, and the addition of
enough pages to make it the largest magazine for the price in America.
With the beginning of 1913 a department of ornamental gardening will be
included in which the cultivation of our showy wild-flowers will receive
adequate treatment. This magazine will continue the matter relative to
ferns now appearing in _The Fern Bulletin_ and all manuscripts used will
be paid for. No reader of Fern Bulletin should fail to subscribe for the
new _American Botanist_ if they wish to keep abreast of the times in
botany. Those who subscribe for 1913 before November 20th, will receive
the November issue free.
Messrs. Ginn & Co. have nearly ready for publication a book on Agronomy
by the editor of _The Fern Bulletin_ which should be of interest to all
who have anything to do with cultivating plants. Although the book is
intended as a school book to be used in connection with gardening
courses, the fact that it not only gives directions for planting and
cultivating kitchen vegetables and flowering plants, but explains the
principles upon which such directions hinge, will make it of much value
to the gardener whether amateur or professional. The book, however, is
not a mere gardening manual. It discusses soils and their origin, the
fundamentals of landscape work and plant breeding, and the effects of
heat, light and moisture upon plants in general. There will also be more
than 200 illustrations.
Ferns Weighing a Ton.--In the tropics ferns often attain the height of
small trees, but their trunks are usually so slender that they never are
of any great weight. For the heaviest trunks we must look among lowlier
species, where the circumference of the short trunk in some cases is so
great that immense weights are attained. In Australia and New Zealand
there grows a relative of the common cinnamon fern named _Todaea
barbata_ which quite takes the palm in this respect. The trunks are
great rounded mosses five or six feet high and at least twenty feet in
circumference, most of the upper surface being beset with living fronds.
Specimens have been found with trunks that were estimated to weigh more
than a ton and a half.