"Juvenal" writes: "I have recently become a subscriber to the Gardeners' Monthly, and am much pleased with the intelligent manner in which all questions are discussed, sometimes in a light wholly different from that which I have been accustomed to in other periodicals. I am surprised that so many views, the opposite of which I have held, so easily carry conviction with them. But I must crave pardon for asking more light on some things. At least on one, the destruction of peach buds; you say it is not the absolute degree of cold as marked by the thermometer that kills them. In this section we have been taught that 10° below zero is the destruction point. It seems reasonable to me that there should be a fixed degree for identical phenomena. We say that water freezes at 320. But we would not say it sometimes freezes at 300, sometimes at 200, - 'according to circumstances' - why then should there be any variation in the degree at which a peach bud should be killed?"

[It would take a long story to give our correspondent the reply he ought to have. We can only say the facts show that there is no definite point of the thermometer at which a plant parts with life. For instance, frost gets in the greenhouse. The gardener shades the house and syringes freely with water, and the plants recover. If he had not done so they would have died from frost. Again, in the moist atmosphere of England broadleaved evergreens will live through the winter at a much lower temperature than in the eastern part of the United States. Again, a potato or turnip frozen in darkness will not rot as soon as one frozen in light, and the evergreen or European Ivy will endure a low temperature on the north side of a wall, while it dies on the higher temperature of the south side.

In brief, we come to look chiefly to transpiration and not to mere temperature for the losses in vegetable life. We know that plants transpire more freely in light than in darkness, in a bright sunshiny day than in one that is cloudy. Temperature of course influences transpiration, but we see that there are other agencies that may aid or obstruct temperature in its work.

Our correspondent in his illustration of water always freezing at 320 makes the same mistake that even eminent teachers make, in looking on vital action as a mere physical question. A log of wood or a fence rail, alongside of a bed of yuccas or other broad-leaved living plants, will "steam" profusely under a burst of sunshine on a spring day. The log will feel warm. But there will be no vapor seen from the leaves and they will feel cool. But a lot of dead leaves will "steam " as well as the piece of wood. Again, on a hot summer day a dead log will feel quite warm, a living trunk cool. We see from these and many similar illustrations that physical laws as they relate to inanimate nature do not operate the same way when dealing with things of life. To make some distinction, we call the loss of moisture when it is the effect of vital action, transpiration. We call the mere physical abstraction of moisture, evaporation. In matter deprived of life only the latter operates; in living things both evaporation and transpiration are at work. - Ed. G. M].