NEWS NOTES AND CURRENT COMMENT. 121 



advocates that teaching should have a place in the system of a 

 biological laboratory, as well as research ; that the advantage of 

 instruction to the investigator lies in the fact "that power of expo- 

 sition can be acquired and perfected, by class-work and lectures, to 

 an extent otherwise unattainable." Instruction further cultivates 

 organic unity in work, supplying the conditions favorable to inter- 

 change of thought among the workers. He also sounds a warning 

 against the ambition to be prolific rather than sound, and expresses 

 the great need for "long-continued, concentrated, and coordinated 

 work." He places especial stress upon the necessity of the 

 specialist coordinating his results with the results of other work- 

 ers. " Physiology is meaningless without morphology, and mor- 

 phology equally so without physiology. . . . Just think of a 

 physiologist seriously proclaiming to the world that instinct reduces 

 itself, in the last analysis, to heliotropism, stereotropism, and the 

 like. . . . Think of a young morphologist, with all the 

 advantages of the Naples Station, loudly sneering at Darwinism,, 

 and spending his wit in derisive caricatures of general truths 

 beyond the horizon of his special work and thought. And shall 

 we forget the physiologist, whose philosopher's stone is the search 

 for his ancestry among the arachnids? Or the anatomist, who 

 reverses his telescope to discover that his science begins and ends in 

 terminology? And could we, much as we might yearn for such a 

 benediction, forget the omnipresent and omniscient systematist, 

 whose creed is summed up in priority?" 



The New England Botanical Club proposes to begin the publi- 

 cation of a monthly sixteen-page illustrated journal. It will deal 

 primarily with the flora of New England, especial attention being 

 given to rare plants, extended ranges of distribution and newly- 

 introduced, as well as newly-described, species. Dr. B. L. Robinson, 

 in the American Naturalist for June, says that "it may seem remark- 

 able that with the many existing botanical periodicals it should be 

 thought necessary to establish new ones, but it is clear that the 

 journal here contemplated will be devoted to a field not at present 

 cultivated by any existing periodical, namely, the local flora of New 

 England. The journal will, doubtless, be largely systematic, and 

 will attempt to do for New England what such periodicals as the 



