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greenish-white flowers. These vary much in size, in the length, breadth and shape of the perianth segments, but in all cases form a pyramid of surpassing beauty. The plant is well worthy of greenhouse culture where it cannot be grown to perfection out of doors; it seems to grow finest on dry sunny hillsides where perfect drainage carries off all moisture from its thick wiry roots. Calochortus splendens was extremely abundant in some parts of the San Bernardino valley, especially about Beaumont, where it is a common weed in the sandy barley fields. The only other species we saw in South California was Calochortus Kennedyi, a handsome orange-coloured species very distinct from any other I know, but this is much more rare and local and grows on the borders of the Mohave desert in much dryer and hotter places than Calochortus splendens. Of the herbaceous perennials common about San Bernardino at the season I thought Pentstemon speciosus the most beautiful; and a Decentra and an Anemonopsis the most curious. Sage-brush and greasewood cover the lower hills, forming a dense and almost impenetrable scrub. Pines are now only found below 4,000 feet in sparse and stunted groups on steep rocky places or in deep ravines, though I should suppose that the hills had once been covered with coniferous forest to a much lower level than at present. We made one excursion to the pine forest above San Bernardino which is accessible by a waggon-road in two places at least, and found two shrubs of great beauty in flower: Styrax Californicum, which grows in shady banks in ravines at 2,000 to 4,000 feet, and Cornus Nuttalli at 4,000 to 5,000 feet, but the latter was here not so large, floriferous or abundant as in the higher, moister and cooler forests of the Yosemite region. The Cornus should succeed well in England though I have never seen it in flower there.

The main object of our excursion to these forests was to see the Snow Plant (Sarcodes sanguinea) in flower, and we were fortunate enough to procure splendid specimens of this very remarkable plant. It does not flower, as its name would imply, in or immediately after the melting snow, as this had been off the ground at least six weeks before we saw it in May, and even then most of the plants were not in full flower. I took some pains to examine the root to see if it was, as reported, really parasitic on the roots of the yellow and sugar pines, P. ponderosa and P. Lambertiana, under which it always grows, I could, however, trace no connection. The root-stock of the plant is a thick fleshy mass of closely packed roots and clayey soil, often as big as a child's head, but though I dug deeply round the mass and washed out the soil as much as possible after lifting it, I could trace no direct connection with the pine-roots, though I believe that decaying pine-roots may act as a host or nidus on which the seed germinates. I usually found the plant growing in small but scattered groups, but never numerous in one place and having the appearance of having grown from seeds. Sometimes two or three stems, but generally only one stem, were produced by each root, and the length of these stems was from ten to twenty inches, of which one-half or less was underground, the subterranean portion being of a rather paler colour than the inflorescence, which was six or eight inches long and two or three inches in diameter. The colour is a very bright flesh or cherry colour, the edges of the bracts,