BOTANY.1

Botany in the National Education Association.—An effort is now under way to bring about greater interest in the teaching of Botany than has hitherto been shown by American botanists. The new department of Natural Science Instruction is intended to bring together the teachers of science (Botany, Zoology, Chemistry, Physics, etc.) who are interested in science as a means of culture, and to stimulate thought and discussion as to how this end may best be obtained. What rôle should Botany play in the mental development of a man? In what way may the study of plants be made an efficient factor in a man's mental training? When and how should plant study be made a part of a man's training? These are some of the questions which will be discussed by the botanists in the Buffalo meeting of the National Educational Association on July 9th and 10th next. It is to be hoped that many who are interested in this department of Botany will be present. -CHARLES E. BESSEY. Coulter's Revision of N. A. Cactaceæ.-Nearly two years ago Dr. Coulter brought out the first part of his revision of the N. A. Cactaceae (Contrib. U. S. Nat. Hist., Vol. III, No. 2), and now in No. 7 of the same volume we have the concluding part. The family as revised now includes North American genera and species as follows: Cactus Linn., Sp. Pl., 466 (= Mamillaria Haw. Synop., 177), with 64 species and varieties; Anhalonium Lem., Cact. Gen. Nov., with 5 species; Lophophora Coulter, a new genus, with 2 species; Echinocactus Link & Otto, Verh. Preuss. Gartenb. Ver., 3,420, with 52 species and varieties; Cereus Mill. Gard. Dict. Ed. 8, with 82 species and varieties; Opuntia Mill. Gard. Dict. Ed. 7, with 101 species and varieties. We have thus a total of 306 species and varieties of North American cactuses. The work is styled a preliminary revision, and the author says, in his prefatory note, that on account of the peculiar difficulties. attending the revision "the undertaking would have been abandoned only that it seemed but proper to contribute to the knowledge of the group such facts as had come to light in the course of several years' study," a most commendable conclusion, indeed.

-CHARLES E. BESSEY.

Botanical News.-Dr. Charles A. White has recently prepared a Memoir of George Engelmann for the National Academy of Scien1 Edited by Prof. C. E. Bessey, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska.

ces. man.

It is a sympathetic sketch of the life of a strong and industrious

A recent bulletin (No. 10) from the Division of Forestry of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, with the title "Timber," contains much of general botanical interest. Such topics as "wood of coniferous trees," "wood of broad-leaved trees," "weight of wood," "shrinkage of wood," "mechanical properties of wood," etc., illustrate the scope of the work. It is deserving of a place in any botanical library

Professor R. A. Harper's confirmation of the act of fertilization in Sphaerotheca costagnei, in the Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft (Bd. XIII, heft. 10) brings grateful relief from the monotonous repetition of doubts as to the accuracy of DeBary's work. The applicability of modern imbedding processes to the study of the lifehistory of the smaller fungi has rarely been better demonstrated than in this satisfactory paper.

The Eli Lilly Co., of Indianapolis, have recently issued an "Exchange List" of their herbarium. It includes 976 names, all in the modern nomenclature.

The Report of the Botanical Department of the New Jersey Experimental Station, by Dr. Halsted, possesses more than the usual interest of similar publications. With much of practical value, the author has mingled a great deal which possesses high scientific interest.

In Professor Scribner's New North American Grasses (Bot. Gaz., March, 1896), four new species and one new genus are described, viz. : Avena mortoniana from Silver Plume, Colo.; Danthonia parryi from Georgetown, Colo.; Zeugites smilacifolia, a curious broad-leaved species from Cuernavaca, Mexico, and Pringleochloa stolonifera, from the vicinity of Mt. Orizaba, Mexico. The new genus is apparently very close to Bulbilis (Buchloë).

The Field Columbian Museum recently issued No. 2 of the Botanical Series of its publications. It contains the "Flora of West Virginia," by Dr. Millspaugh, and is a considerable enlargement of an experiment station report made by the same author a couple of years ago. It includes 2584 names, of which 980 are Fungi, 115 Lichens, 123 Bryophytes, 57 Pteridophytes, and 1309 Authophytes. The nomenclature is modern and the work is well done, but one is sorely puzzled with the peculiar sequence of families in the Fungi, in which one finds in strange juxtaposition Saccharomycetacea, Diatomacea and Myxomycetea (pp. 84-85).

Professor Greene's "New Western Plants," in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (Feb. 7, 1896), con

tains descriptions of some interesting plants, e. g., Trifolium truncatum, T. lilacinum, T. rostratum, Boisduvalia diffusa, Valerianella magna, V. ciliosa, Lessingia pectinata, Pyrrocoma eriopoda, P. solidaginea, P. subviscosa, Aster militaris, A. frondeus and Vagnera pallescens. To the same paper is appended a revision of the genus Tropidocarpum, including four species.

An important paper comes to us from the College of Agriculture of the Imperial University of Japan (Bull. 5, Vol. II, Dec., 1895). It includes a descriptive list of the winter state of the trees of Japan, by H. Shirasawa, illustrated by twelve crowded plates of twigs and buds.

Dr. J. C. Arthur has found out that the common notion of farmers that one of the seeds in the bur of the Cocklebur (Xanthium canadense) germinates one year and the other does not grow until the following or some subsequent year is true. He details his observations and experiments in a paper in the Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science. "The purpose of this seemingly unique character is to distribute the two seeds of the bur in time, the customary distribution in space being impossible owing to the indehiscent structure."

The announcement that the Botanical Gazette is hereafter to be published by the University of Chicago will please every friend of science, since it insures its permanence and provides for that growth which the development of American botany demands.

Suggestions About Antidromy and Didromy.-The interesting notes from Prof. Todd in the NATURALIST for March seem to me to bear upon a phenomenon which is different from what I have called antidromy: upon the secondary changes in the ordinary growth which seem to be intimately related to the direction of light and the necessities of exposure to air. They are commonly shown by the foliage of such plants as the elm, morningglory, peach, and Forsythia, and very often by flowers, in which they may subserve cross-fertilization.

Antidromy, in its strict sense, is a diversity of a primitive character, arising phylogenetically away down in the cryptogams, and maintained with singular constancy through all the Phaenogams; and ontogenetically it starts in the ovule, depending on the circumstance that every plant bears two castes of seeds, one set on each border of the carpellary phyllome. I have not yet determined whether it is a dextrose seed that grows on the right margin of the carpel: but all the carpels on the same plant seem to retain the twist of the plant which bears them (well

shown by the twisted pods of species of Prosopis), whilst the seeds which arise from the two sides of a carpel are diverse. The order of development in the carpel may depend on the direction of the nutriment, and on the lines of least resistance in the crowded condition of young organs resulting in right-handed and left-handed ovules. The outcome is that in the adult plant the whole phyllotaxy, including the floral structure and ramification of the entire organism and its inflorescence, are of one and the same order in any one individual plant, and of a different order in other plants of the same species. Whether this is of any special advantage to the grown plants I cannot say; but possibly by imparting different habits of growth to the various members of crowded vegetation, it may cause them to separate from each other, and so may diminish the intricate interlacing which is so injuri ous to gregarious plants.

Now that the season of vegetation is returning it is to be hoped that some of our young botanists will make and record their observations on this subject. We want especially to find out exceptions, apparent or real. My first paper was incorrect as to the supposed antidromy of rows of grains in the case of maize; dissection seemed to teach this; but I might have foreseen that the ear is just like the male panicle, having a disorderly crowd of grains rearranged by a secondary process into orderly rows, each row, however, including both dextral and sinistral grains. The case of the Bilsted (Liquidambar) is a puzzle, some of the branches of the same tree having dextral phyllotaxy, and others having sinistral phyllotaxy; this is the only case of the true internal antidromy known to me, though I shall not be surprised by the discovery of other similar cases. A somewhat similar condition is reported to me by Prof. Francis E. Lloyd, of Forrest Grove, Oregon, in ten cases of Acer circinatum. Perhaps these cases are allied to that of plants arising from rootstalks, as Iris and Calla, Helonias, Nuphar, etc., in which different plants arising from the same rootstalk are antidromic. It will be worthy of examination whether sarmentose plants, as strawberry, and the Saxifraga described by Prof. Todd are antidromic as between those grown from the same original stock.

The phenomenon which I have termed didromy, where the same member is twisted in opposite directions at its two extremities, seems to me to be always related to the immediate life of the plant, and to have no genetic significancy. The didromic twist of the awn of Danthonia and other grasses, results in the upper part penetrating an object so soon as the lower part untwists by the application of water: that of the long peduncle of Vallisneria approximates the extremities, thus

pulling the fertilized flower down through the water without turning it around. If I am correct in the observation that some plants of Vallisneria have the dextral twist at the lower part, and others have the sinistral twist below, this would be a complex of the primitive antidromy having superposed upon it a recently acquired didromy.

A different line of investigation will search out the relation of dextrorse or sinistrorse phyllotaxy to the leaf-traces in the stem. I am convinced that inattention to this point has marred some of the work on the histology and the plan of the fibrovascular bundles, and that even with opposite-leaved plants, many species will be found to exhibit a duplicate pattern as between the arrangements in different individuals of a species.-GEORGE MACLOSKIE.

Princeton College, March 16, 1896.

VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY.1

A New Classification of Bacteria.-In a recent number of Die Natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien (Lieferung 129, Leipsic, 1896) Prof. W. Migula, of Karlsruhe, gives a classification of the bacteria which is much more practical and satisfactory than that of Dr. Alfred Fischer, noticed in the September (1895) number of this journal. Migula's arrangement seems, on the whole, to be the best yet devised, and will probably come into general use, at least among botanists. The characters of several genera are amended, properly it seems to the writer, e. g., Bacterium, Bacillus, Streptothrix, and other genera are discarded as being founded on purely biological grounds, e. g., Photobacterium, Nitromonas, Clostridium. Of course, biological peculiarities are recognized as indispensable in the differentiation of species. In reading this paper one is occasionally surprised at the omissions, but taken in its entirety the work of consulting literature seems to have been very carefully done, and what is more important the classification appears to have grown out of a long and wide experience in the laboratory, and seems to be eminently usable. This paper treats briefly of most important literature, morphology, vegetative condition, resting state, cultures on artificial media, biological peculiarities, geographical distribution, rela

This department is edited by Erwin F. Smith, Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C.