Strange that a family which furnishes the carrot, parsnip, parsley, fennel, caraway, coriander, and celery to mankind, should contain many members with deadly properties. Fortunately the large, coarse WATER HEMLOCK, SPOTTED COWBANE, MUSQUASH ROOT, or BEAVER-POISON (Cicuta maculata) has been branded as a murderer. Purple streaks along its erect branching stem correspond to the marks on Cain's brow. Above swamps and low ground it towers. Twice or thrice pinnate leaves, the lower ones long-stalked and often enormous, the leaflets' conspicuous veins apparently ending in the notches of the coarse, sharp teeth, help to distinguish it from its innocent relations sometimes confounded with it. Its several tuberiform fleshy roots contain an especially deadly poison; nevertheless, some highly intelligent animals, beavers, rabbits, and the omnivorous small boy among others have mistaken it for sweet-cicely with fatal results. Indeed, the potion drunk by Socrates and other philosophers and criminals at Athens, is thought to have been a decoction made from the roots of this very hemlock. Many little white flowers in each cluster make up a large umbel; and many umbels to a plant attract great numbers of flies, small bees, and wasps, which sip the freely exposed nectar apparently with only the happiest consequences, as they transfer pollen from the male to the proterandrous hermaphrodite flowers. Just as the cow-parsnip shows a preponderance of flies among its visitors, so the water hemlock seems to attract far more bees and wasps than any of the umbel-bearing carrot tribe. It blooms from the end of June through August. Still another poisonous species is the HEMLOCK WATER-PARSNIP (Sium cicutaefolium), found in swampy places throughout Canada and the United States from ocean to ocean. The compound, long-rayed umbels of small white flowers, fringy-bracted below, which measure two or three inches across; the extremely variable pinnate leaves, which may be divided into from three to six pairs of narrow and sharply toothed leaflets (or perhaps the lower long-stalked ones as finely dissected as a wild carrot leaf where they grow in water), and the stout, grooved, branching stem, from two to six feet tall, are its distinguishing characteristics. In these umbels it will be noticed there are far more hermaphrodite, or two-sexed, florets (maturing their anthers first), than there are male ones; consequently quantities of unwelcome seed are set with the help of small bees, wasps, and flies, which receive generous entertainment from July to October. The MOCK BISHOP'S-WEED (Ptilimnium capillaceum), a slender, delicate, dainty weed found chiefly in saltwater meadows from Massachusetts to Florida and around the Gulf coast to Texas, has very finely dissected, fringy leaves and compound umbels two to four inches across, of tiny white florets, with threadlike bracts below. It blooms throughout the summer. FLOWERING DOGWOOD (Cornus florida) Dogwood family