A New Jersey correspondent says; "Will you please give me the name of the inclosed moss, which I find growing in company with unlimited quantities of lichen on a lot of old cedars on the river bank in front of my cottage. As these trees, knarled and twisted as they are, are very necessary to me, I have amused myself for a week past, scraping the lichen off.

"I know that the lichen is not regarded among botanists as a true parasite but as an epiphyte. But I am satisfied from my own observations the past week, that the lichen is almost as deadly in its embraces as the mistletoe or the fabled Upas tree itself - though possibly longer about it.

"Small limbs, twigs and sometimes the entire tree, if fairly girdled with the lichen, are dead in most cases or dying. The lichen has a strong affinity for moisture and very retentive thereof - trees on the river bank, more or less damp from exhalations from the river, have much lichen upon them - while the same trees (cedars) a hundred yards back have little or none.

"On lifting a piece of lichen from the tree I find the spot beneath invariably damp or even wet and the bark discolored, and generally more or less rotten or doted, penetrating in some cases to the wood. 'Tis, in my opinion, this wetting process that destroys the twig, limb or tree. But whether the lichen does it with ' malice prepense,' as a lawyer would put it, I am not botanist enough to determine.

"Will you please enlighten me on this point, for I am not a little interested in the lichen".

[The old gardeners - whose practice was often better than their reasonings - always insisted on the advantages of scraping lichens from the bark of fruit trees. But modern gardeners teach that if fruit trees are properly cared for they will throw off lichens themselves. In other words, the existence of lichens is a sign of bad health. Scraping the bark or any other thing that "injures or closes the pores," as these good people say, is regarded as an evil. We have, however, seen so much good result from slitting the bark of hide-bound trees, - lime washing those covered by lichen or moss, - and soap cleaning trees that were even in fair health, that, though our natural tendencies are with scientific progress, we are compelled to admit that the practice is good, and therefore to believe that mosses and lichens may have, as our correspondent believes, some injurious tendency, quite aside from the general belief that they feed wholly on dead bark or other material. - Ed. G. M].