“All the Kalmias resort to a most ingenious device for compelling insect visitors to carry their pollen from blossom to blossom. A newly opened flower has its stigma erected where the incoming bee must leave on its sticky surface the four minute orange-like grains carried from the anther of another flower on the hairy underside of her body. Now, each anther is tucked away in one of the ten little pockets of the saucer-shaped blossom and the elastic filaments are strained upward like a bow. After hovering above the nectary, the bee has only to descend towards it, when her leg, touching against one of the hair-triggers of the spring trap, pop! goes the little anther-gun, discharging pollen from its bores as it flies upward. So delicately is the mechanism adjusted, the slightest jar or rough handling releases the anthers; but, on the other hand, should insects be excluded by a net stretched over the plant, the flowers will fall off and wither without firing off their pollen-charged guns. At least this is true in the great majority of tests. As in the case of hot-house flowers, no fertile seed is set when nets keep away the laurel’s benefactors.” Many of our readers reside near the home of the Mountain Laurel and can examine the interesting features of this beautiful plant in Nature’s own garden. Those that do this will be well repaid. Violets stir and arbutus waits, Claytonia’s rosy bells unfold; Dandelion through the meadow makes A royal road, with seals of gold. —Helen Hunt Jackson. [Illustration: ] Description of Plate.—A, staminate (male) inflorescence; B, pistillate (female) inflorescence; C, fruiting branch; 1, staminate flower; 2, perigone; 3, stamen; 4, open anther; 5, pollen; 6, pistillate catkin; 7, 8, 9, pistillate flowers; 10, scales; 11, 12, 13, scales and flowers; 14, 15, fruit; 16, 17, 19, seed; 20, resin gland (lupulin). HOPS. (_Humulus lupulus L._) “A land of hops and poppy-mingled fields.” —Tennyson: Aylmer’s Field. The hop plant is a creeping perennial with several stems or branches attaining a length of fifteen to twenty-five feet. It has numerous opposite three to five lobed, palmately veined, coarsely toothed leaves with long leaf stalks (petioles). Flowers unisexual, that is staminate and pistillate flowers separate, either on separate plants (dioecious) or upon different branches of the same plant (monoecious). Flowers insignificant in loose, drooping axillary panicles. Fruit a cone-like catkin usually designated a strobile.