216 SHORT NOTES AND QUERIES. 



Veronica triphyllos. — I have great pleasure in sending you a spe- 

 cimen of Veronica triphyllos. I found it in a Clover-field about a mile 

 from Langley, Buckinghamshire. In the same field grew Camelina of 

 two kinds, and two or three other plants I had never seen before. — E. C. 

 White. [Mrs. White's specimens of V. triphyllos are very luxuriant, 

 6 or 8 inches high. There can be little doubt that the plant was, as well 

 as the Ccuiielina and other strange weeds, sown with the Clover. The 

 locality has been accidentally but erroneously recorded as " near Ealing, 

 Middlesex," in the 'Gardeners' Chronicle' (1871), p. 674. The plant 

 has not yet been noticed in that county. — H. T.] 



Right-handed v. Left-handed. — In the March number of this Jour- 

 nal (p. 78) I brought before the notice of readers the great want of uni- 

 formity in accent in botanical names which obtains, even among the masters 

 of the science. I now lay before thera a confusion in the use of the above 

 terms recently brought under my notice. At the May meeting of the 

 London Mathematical Society, Professor Clerk Maxwell requested infor- 

 mation from the members as to the convention established among mathe- 

 maticians with respect to the relation between the positive direction of 

 motion along any axis, and tlie positive direction of rotation round it. 

 Stating the conventions in use amongst the rival sets of writers, he illus- 

 trated his remarks thus : in the writings of the one set the positive direc- 

 tions of translation and rotation are connected as in a left-handed screw 

 or the tendril of the Hop ; in those of the other set, they are symbolized 

 by an ordinary or right-handed screw or the tendril of the Vine ; and he 

 refers to Linnfeus (' Philosophia Botanica,' 1757, p. 39), where, speaking 

 of the trunk, he says, " Caulis . . . spiraliter ascendens. . . . Sinistrorsum 

 ([ secundum solem vulgo : Humulus, Lonicera, Tamus. Dextrorsum 

 ]) contra motum solis vulgo : Convolvulus, Phaseolus," etc. Mr. Max- 

 well states also that De Candolle was the first botanist who, in 1827, has 

 decided otherwise, and that many botanists have been led astray and per- 

 verted by him. (I am not acquainted with the references upon which this 

 statement is founded.) Now it may not be of much importance to bota- 

 nists how this question is settled, but it is, as Mr. Maxwell showed, of some 

 considerable importance to mathematicians. " In pure mathematics little in- 

 convenience is felt from the want of uniformity, but in astronomy, electro- 

 magnetics, and all physical sciences, it is of the greatest importance that 

 one or other system should be specified and persevered in. The relation 

 between the one system and the other is the same as that between an object 

 and its reflected imrige,and the operation of passing from the one to the otiier 

 has been called by Listing /^frrcrs/o//." The upshot of the discussion was 

 that, in consequence of the arguments of Sir W. Thomson aiul Dr. 

 Hirst in favour of the right-handed system derived from the motion of the 

 earth and planets, and the convention that the north is to be reckoned 

 positive, the right-handed system,— symbolized, as Professor Maxwell 

 expresses himself, " by a corkscrew or the tendril of the Vine," — was 

 adopted by the Society. (Cf. lleport of the Meeting in No. 82 of 

 ' Nature.') — R. Tucker. 



