A writer in the Dixie Farmer, says there is as much trouble in keeping a breed of cotton pure, as a breed of corn or melons. There is a constant tendency to vary from the type. He believes it to be caused by the visits of insects.

Wet Weather and the Growth of Trees, It is said that some scientific society has instituted a series of experiments to find out in the far away past which were the wet and which were the dry seasons, by having examined the thickness of annual growths of wood in old trunks. It is surprising that any intelligent body in these days should not know better than this. Wood is not plastered over the old series, as a painter would put one coat on the coat which had gone before, but is an act of vital power proceeding from the cells of wood of the preceding year or season's growth. The amount of wood deposited depends very much on the food to be had in the vicinity of the little cells which have to make the new mass. If, say, at ten feet from the ground, there be a little branch with leaves having a chance to make food, the annual ring of wood will be thicker just below than at two or three feet lower down. In fact if we cut a trunk across at half a dozen places, and take any one side of the trunk for examination, we shall find the "annual ring" of any one year varying in thickness. One section would tell us it rained that year like a deluge, while another section of the same tree would tell us that particular year was the dryest on record.

However, if this is not sufficient, it may be as well to add that Sir Herbert Christi-son, the great Scotch chemist, has made some curious observations on the effects of a cold wet season in diminishing the normal growth of trees. He found on careful measurement that, comparing 1879 with 1878, eleven deciduous trees - not oaks - made on an average 41 per cent. less growth in last year than in the year before. Of seventeen pine trees, the average deficiency was 20 per cent., so that heat appears to have more to do with the making of wood than moisture has. It is strange that the growth of the oak, which drops its leaves, seems less dependent on heat than that of the pine, which we usually associate with very cold regions.