BOTANY. 341 



extract the pleasant odor of its essential oil. The vial con- 

 taining the bark and glycerin, when looked at askance, emits 

 a rich, bluish shimmer. On comparing a decoction of the 

 bark of this shrub with that of ^Esculus, or buckeye, by con- 

 centrating the sun's rays with a lens into a cone of light 

 passing through the liquids, I discovered that the Calycan- 

 thus decoction is strikingly superior in intensity and purity 

 of blue color in the fluorescing cone to the JEsculus decoc- 

 tion (Robert Toombs, M.D., Washington, Georgia). 



The Effect of Frost on Chlorophyl Granules. 



Haberlandt states that the granules, except in evergreens, 

 undergo changes at 4 to 6 C. The granules thus atfected 

 contain cavities (vacuoles), become rent on the outside, and. 

 aoro-reo-ate into larger or smaller masses. The granules which 

 contain starch are more easily destroyed by frost than those 

 which contain none. The chlorophyl in the palisade tissue 

 (the denser parenchyma) is more easily injured than in the 

 spongy tissue, and. the latter than in the guardian cells of the 

 stomata (Naturalist, March, 1877). 



Effect of Frost oil Evergreen Leaves. 



This is the question which M. Mer has been striving to 

 answer; and from his paper in the Bulletin of the Botanical 

 Society of France w T e gather that in some cases, as in ivy, 

 the leaves may exist on the reserve stores accumulated in the 

 stem without themselves assimilating any food from the air. 

 In other cases they form starch in their tissues ; and if this 

 be not always readily found, the explanation is to be sought 

 in the circumstance that it is transferred to the store-cells in 

 the stem as soon as formed. M. Mer divides the tissues of 

 the leaf into two groups, the office of the one being to as- 

 similate, that of the other to store the food, formed by the 



former. 



The Wood- Oil Tree. 



According to a recent report from Chittagong, it seems 

 that there is great danger of the wood-oil or gurjun-oil trees 

 (Dipterocarpus turbinatus) becoming, in course of time, ex- 

 terminated. These gurjun-oil forests are described as occu- 

 pying the outer hills from one end of the hill tracts to the 

 other; and this distribution is so marked that this class of 



