201 



dissect with a power of 100, they must of necessity be manipulating with 

 very small points, and in a very small space. These lenses were made in 

 several forms and with various powers, but no one should give them up 

 because they seemed to have such small fields. 



Mr. Michael said he should not like Mr. White's remark to go out as to 

 Stephenson's binocular without some qualification. He had used it him- 

 self for insect dissection, and could only say that he found the relative 

 distance between the head and the hands to be a matter of the greatest 

 possible comfort. He had worked in this way with a Siebert £in. of very 

 much shorter focus than an English ^in., and he did not think he could 

 possibly have done it with the head so near the hands as in the little instru- 

 ment before them. It was a most charming little instrument, but for fine 

 dissections he thought it was not so convenient as the Stephenson. The 

 binocular arrangement was also a great comfort to the eyes, and was very 

 useful in giving a notion as to whether an object was above or below 

 another in the field; although it did not profess to be stereoscopic, practi- 

 cally it was so ; the large flat stage was also very convenient. 



Mr. T. C. White said he did not wish to give rise to any false impressions 

 as to the value of the Stephenson binocular. On the contrary, he liked it 

 exceedingly, and the only thing he felt disposed to object to was its large 

 size. Of its value as a binocular there can be no doubt whatever. 



Mr. Sigsworth said it appeared to him a question whether the invention 

 of the larger form exhibited could be credited to Zeiss, for he had one him- 

 self by Chevalier made thirty years ago which seemed to be exactly the 

 same. 



A paper by Mr. J. W. Morris, F.L.S., of Bath, " On the fibro-vascular 

 bundles in Ferns, and their value in determining affinities of genera," was 

 read by Mr. Curties. 



The President said that it should be borne in mind that the assertions 

 made in the early part of the paper would apply equally to all other classes 

 included in the study of Botany. It was true no doubt that Linnaeus gave a 

 generic name to a certain set of plants, and that ten years afterwards some 

 one else gave another name to the same, so that it happened in the course of 

 half a century that they got a number of synonymy, each accurate enough 

 in its way, according to the light which the observer had at the time he was 

 writing, and which justified him in discarding the classification adopted by 

 those possessing less light who had gone before. This, however, did not 

 prove that the student of the present day was consequently justified in 

 entirely altering the plan upon which all classification had hitherto been 

 based, and he did not see that the proposal applied more to Ferns than to 

 any other branch of Natural History. As to the value of adopting a plan 

 based upon peculiarities of sti'ucture, such as was recommended in the 

 paper, it would be found incontrovertibly that such a plan would be of no 

 use for the purpose, and that certainly it would be of no use to propose to 

 classify Ferns in this manner whilst it was not equally applied to other 

 structures. At present the great and primary position was that in which 



