522 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



"Ber. dcutsch.chem. Ges.," 1878, xi.,1). A summary of recent 

 British Investigations on Bacteria is to be found in the ad- 

 dress of Sir J. D. Hooker, before the Royal Society of Lon- 

 don, which was reported in Nature. It seems to be more 

 and more the accepted opinion that the spores of the differ- 

 ent bacteria can endure a greater degree of heat than the 

 sterile conditions, and in several instances the spores have 

 withstood a temperature of at least 220 Fahr. without ap- 

 parent injury, whereas the sterile conditions of the same spe- 

 cies were destroyed by a temperature considerably below the 



boiling-point. 



Vegetable Physiology. 



In the Annates des /Sciences there is a number of interest- 

 ing papers on different subjects relating to vegetable physi- 

 ology. Van Tieghem relates his Experiments on the Diges- 

 tion of Albumen. He made use of seeds containing albumen 

 of two different kinds, as fleshy and farinaceous, and em- 

 ployed two different methods: first, where the albumen was 

 isolated and submitted to the germinating process ; and sec- 

 ond, where the whole seed was allowed to germinate. He 

 concludes by saying that the fleshy albumen has an activity 

 of its own. It digests itself, and the embryo simply absorbs 

 the products of this internal digestion. The farinaceous al- 

 bumen, on the contrary, is passive, and is digested by the 

 embryo itself. There is also a translation in the same jour- 

 nal of the article of Wiesner on the Influence of Light and 

 Radiation of Heat on Exhalation. The theory of Wiesner is 

 that luminous rays are transformed into calorific rays by the 

 action of chlorophyll certainly a brilliant discovery. 



In the same journal are papers by Vesque on the Tempera- 

 ture of the Soil; on the Absorption of Water by the Roots; 

 on Absorption compared to Transpiration ; and on the Causes 

 of the Ascent of the Sap. The Mechanical Theory of the Cell 

 is discussed by Dr. Moritz Traube, in the Botanische Zeitung. 

 Sachs, in reply, doubts whether the intussusception theory 

 of Traube, in regard to the mechanical cell, can be fully 

 applied to the living vegetable cell. A Aery spirited corre- 

 spondence thereupon has been carried on between Traube and 

 Sachs. In the " Beitrage zur Biologic," Just has an elaborate 

 paper on the Influence of Heat on the Germination of Seeds. 



Dr. E. Askenasy, of Heidelberg, has published a detailed 



