the obscure and offensive snow-bush, stunted, scabrous, and without green or leaf. The Floramo became deeply interested in the phenomenon, and gathered many specimens of the shrub from the top of the mountain. They fed the bird till it became plump, and then shut it up in one of their irelium vacuum-chambers with only the nuts to peck. There they watched it from day to day, and saw that as long as it fed on the nuts it continued vigorous and lively, even though it began to lose its rounded outlines again. They soon closed their experiment, and set the winged creature free to fly whither it would, satisfied that there could be only one logical conclusion with regard to the plant. They saw that its nature was to lay up stores of oxygen in all its tissues, and they called it alfarene or the oxygen-shrub. It was this treasure in it that enabled it to live so long beneath vast accumulations of snow and ice; it was this feature of its life that made it when open to the air so exhaust the oxygen for yards around it that men found it difficult to breathe beside it; it was this that, when it became the food of the bird, enabled it to live and breathe so long away from the air. It was the outcome of long ages of selection up in those difficult altitudes, where nothing could live under the snow without this power of storing up oxygen. And its nuts, too hard and innutritious except for hunger-driven birds to attack, concentrated round the seeds an extraordinary amount of this oxygen-stuff; and by means of this, when underneath the pressure of the snows the husk broke, the seeds were able to support themselves and develop into plants away from the vital air.