1893- NOTES AND COMMENTS. 91 



The illustration of scientific lectures or papers by means of 

 lantern-slides is becoming fairly general ; and it certainly tends to 

 render the meetings of learned societies more instructive as well as 

 more interesting. In this way the physical features of a country or 

 the microscopic structure of a rock, the organisms of sewage or the 

 " extinct monsters " of many geological periods, may be faithfully 

 reproduced on the screen from photographs or original drawings.. 

 The Royal Society, the Linnean Society, the Royal and London 

 Institutions, the Geologists' Association, and other bodies in London,, 

 have introduced the lantern into their meeting-rooms with marked 

 success ; the Geological Society, however, has hitherto held aloof. 



There must be a sad lack of originality, combined with a confused 

 sense of the rights of literary property, at the Royal Gardens, Kew. 

 Not very long ago, the Assistant Director was in trouble about the 

 originality of some observations about sugar canes, and now the 

 Director himself has to answer for a remarkable feat in the way of 

 piracy. At least, this is the case according to a letter we have 

 received from Mr. James Britten, Editor of the Journal of Botany. It 

 appears that when Miss North died, Mr. Hemsley wrote for the 

 Journal of Botany an obituary notice which was published in that 

 Journal for 1890 (p. 329). Last year. Miss 'i'^oriYCs Recollections of a 

 Happy Life was published, and the Fifth Edition of the Guide to the 

 North Gallery has recently appeared, with a short biographical 

 account of Miss North, which is officially stated to be compiled from the 

 Recollections, and other sources. Mr. Britten writes that, on the 

 contrary, this biography " is taken bodily, and without a word of 

 diC\inovfle,dgv[\Qnt, ix ova the Journal of Botany. . . . The Recollections 

 have yielded twelve lines out of five pages ; from the ' other sources,' 

 apart from the Journal of Botany, not a sentence has been cited." 



Two new botanical journals appeared last month. The one is 

 under the direction of the Department of Botany in the University 

 of California, and named Erythea : a Journal of Botany^ West American 

 and General. The other is a monthly, entitled The Orchid Review,. 

 published by Messrs. West, Newman & Co., London. The Germans 

 have also issued a new geological ^monthly, entitled Zeitschrift fur 

 praktische Geologie. 



