=Galax and its Affinities.=--One of the most interesting plants of the Southern mountain region is the galax (_Galax aphylla_), which grows in the highlands more or less abundantly from Virginia southward. The slopes of Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, are carpeted with it for many square miles of almost uninterrupted extent. Besides being an attractive plant at home, its thick, leathery, rounded cordate leaves, deep green or crimson or mixed, according to the season, make it much in demand for decoration, and tons of it in the aggregate are shipped, from places where it grows abundantly, for that purpose. Its affiliations with certain other Alpine and arctic plants are described in a carefully studied paper on the Order Diapensisceæ, published by Margaret Farsman Boynton in the Journal of the National Science Club, Washington. Linnæus found in Lapland a creeping evergreen herb, matting the surface with its stiff, spatulate leaves, and described it in 1737 as _Diapensia lapponica_. Then galax was discovered by Gronovius and given a place by Linnæus--because of its stamens rather than of its natural affinities--along with Diapensia. Michaux, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, found _Pyxidanthera barbulata_, resembling diapensia, in the pine barrens of New Jersey and North Carolina. More recently other species of diapensia and _Berneuxia_ have been found among the Himalayas, and _Schizocodon_ of several species in Japan. One of the most remarkable discoveries in the list was that by Michaux in the mountains of North Carolina of a plant which was afterward called _Shortia galacifolia_, from the resemblance of its leaves to those of galax. This plant in a living state was then lost, and when Gray and Torrey looked for it in 1831 in vain, only one preserved specimen of it was known to be extant and that in fruit; and it was not till 1877 that it was collected, rediscovered, in fact, in flower, as Gray has said, "by an herbalist almost absolutely ignorant of botany, who was only informed of his good fortune on sending to a botanist one of the two specimens collected by him." The Shortia, so far as is known, grows only in a very narrow district, and those who know the place are careful not to direct the public to it. Specimens have been collected by a few nurserymen, who cultivate it and have it for sale. The plants of this list are variously classified as among one another by botanists, but are regarded as belonging to a common group. "The real story of their development," says the author of the paper, "can be gathered only in hints from their present distribution, for unfortunately they have neither gallery of ancestral portraits nor recorded geological tree." But their ancestors are supposed to have been pushed down by the glaciers and left where the modern forms are found. Almost anywhere in the boreal flora _Diapensia lapponica_ may be found, whether in northern Asia, or Europe, or America, or even on