In anticipation of the consolidation of this magazine with The American Botanist at the end of the year, some very extensive improvements in the new magazine are to be made. Among the more important are a better grade of paper, the use of numerous illustrations, and the addition of enough pages to make it the largest magazine for the price in America. With the beginning of 1913 a department of ornamental gardening will be included in which the cultivation of our showy wild-flowers will receive adequate treatment. This magazine will continue the matter relative to ferns now appearing in The Fern Bulletin and all manuscripts used will be paid for. No reader of Fern Bulletin should fail to subscribe for the new American Botanist if they wish to keep abreast of the times in botany. Those who subscribe for 1913 before November 20th, will receive the November issue free.

Messrs. Ginn & Co. have nearly ready for publication a book on Agronomy by the editor of The Fern Bulletin which should be of interest to all who have anything to do with cultivating plants. Although the book is intended as a school book to be used in connection with gardening courses, the fact that it not only gives directions for planting and cultivating kitchen vegetables and flowering plants, but explains the principles upon which such directions hinge, will make it of much value to the gardener whether amateur or professional. The book, however, is not a mere gardening manual. It discusses soils and their origin, the fundamentals of landscape work and plant breeding, and the effects of heat, light and moisture upon plants in general. There will also be more than 200 illustrations.

Ferns Weighing a Ton.—In the tropics ferns often attain the height of small trees, but their trunks are usually so slender that they never are of any great weight. For the heaviest trunks we must look among lowlier species, where the circumference of the short trunk in some cases is so great that immense weights are attained. In Australia and New Zealand there grows a relative of the common cinnamon fern named Todaea barbata which quite takes the palm in this respect. The trunks are great rounded mosses five or six feet high and at least twenty feet in circumference, most of the upper surface being beset with living fronds. Specimens have been found with trunks that were estimated to weigh more than a ton and a half.