him who heedlessly should touch the milk-sap that flows abundantly from its easily wounded bark. Large blisters, painful ulcers, like those produced by our poisonous sumach, only more dangerous, are the inevitable consequences. This is the Antiar of the Javanese, the Pohon Upas (signifying poison-tree) of the Malays, the Ipo of Celebes and the Philippines (Antiaris toxicaria). NUTS --GRANT ALLEN On the wooded slope where the park shelves slowly toward the Bourne Brook, the ground to-day (October) is thickly strewn in many places with the sharp, prickly husks and small, barren, angular nutlets of the beautiful Spanish chestnuts. They are not truly indigenous to Britain, these noble spreading forest trees, though they have been planted so long in our pleasure grounds and lawns that we have got to look upon them almost as naturalized British subjects; and the climate, though it suits the leaves and wood well enough, is not sufficiently kindly to ripen the fruits in due season; they are almost always mere empty, shriveled shells here in England, so that we have to import seed for sowing from the mountain regions of Southern Europe. There we have all seen them growing in their own wild luxuriance on the lower escarpments of the Alps or the Apennines, and bringing forth fertile nuts sufficient to feed half the teeming population of the Lombard plain in seasons of scarcity. Side by side with them in the park here, the boys are impartially shying sticks at the very similar, though wholly unrelated, clusters of the common horse-chestnuts, which, in spite of their close external likeness, belong in reality to a totally different and much more restricted family. The true chestnut is a catkin bearer, a near relation of the English oak, as one might almost guess at sight from its foliage and habit; the horse-chestnut is a member of a tribe unrepresented in our native English flora, but not very unlike the maples and sycamores in its principal characters. It is interesting to note how in the case of these two wholly different and originally dissimilar trees similarity of circumstances has at last produced such great similarity of adaptive peculiarities.