236 BERKELEY, ADDRESS AT NORWICH. 



very diligent search, and employed others in collecting any 

 fungi which may occur on rice, and has found nothing more 

 than a small superficial fungus nearly allied to Cladosporium 

 herbarum, sullying the glumes exactly as that cosmopolitan 

 mould stains our cereals in damp weather. Rice is occasion- 

 ally ergoted, but I can find no other trace of fungi on the 

 grains. Again, when he talks of Tilletia, or the wheat bunt, 

 being derived from the East — supposing wheat to be a plant 

 of Eastern origin, there is no evidence to bear out the asser- 

 tion, as it occurs on various European grasses ; and thei'e is 

 a distinct species which preys on wheat in North Carolina, 

 which is totally unknown in the Old World. 



I might enter further into the matter, were it advisable to 

 do so at the present moment. All I wish, however, is to give 

 a caution against admitting his facts too implicitly, especially 

 as somewhat similar views respecting disease have lately 

 reached us from America, and have become familiar from 

 gaining admittance into a journal of such wide circulation as 

 ' All the Year Round,' where Hallier's views are noticed as 

 if his deductions were perfectly logical. 



The functions of spiral vessels, or of vascular tissue in 

 general, have long been a subject of much controversy, and 

 few matters are of more consequence as regards the real 

 history of the distribution of sap in plants. A very able 

 paper on the subject, to which allusion Avas made by 

 Dr. Hooker in his address, has been published by Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer (than whom few enter more profoundly 

 into questions of physiology) in the 'Transactions of the Lin- 

 nean Society.' By a line of close argument and observation 

 he shows, from experiments with coloured fluids capable of 

 entering the tissues Avithout impairing vitality, and that not 

 only in cuttings of plants, but in individuals in Avhich the 

 roots were uninjured, that the sap not only ascends by the 

 vascular tissue, but that the same tissue acts in its turn 

 as an absorbent, returning and distributing the sap which 

 has been modified in the leaves. That this tissue acts some 

 important part is clear from the constancy with which it is 

 produced at a very early stage in adventitious buds, estab- 

 lishing a connection between the tissues of the old and nevv 

 parts. This appears also from the manner in which in true 

 parasites a connection is established between the vascular 

 tissue of the matrix and its parasite, as shoAvn by our presi- 

 dent in his masterly treatise on Balanophone, and more 

 recently by Solms-Laubach in an elaborate memoir in 

 * Pringsheim's Journal.' It is curious that in organs so 

 closely analogous to the tracheee of insects a similar connectioa 



