26 THE JOUKXAL OF EOTAXT 



it in til is same locality in 1900, naming it Ryssoims, and he likewise 

 found it there in 1908, but omitted to record it. It has, however, 

 been noted {vide B. E. Club Eeport, 1908, ii. 350) for "Sussex, as 

 an alien," exact locality unknown to me. This is the first time it 

 has been actually recorded for Hants, although doubtless it has 

 been there, with Dianthus lylumarius L. and Ryssopus officinalis L. 

 ever since the da_Ys of the monks, this Abbey being dissolved in 1589, 

 temp. Henry VIII. As both the aforementioned have long been 

 admitted to our Floras, the insertion of Satureja moniana should 

 follow on the same grounds. — J. Cosmo Mela^ill. 



HE VIEWS. 



Le M If the des SymUotes. Par Auguste LuiiiEEE, Pp. xi + 205. 

 6 fr. 8vo. Masson, Paris, 1919. 



The tendency of modern bacteriologists has been to glorify their 

 ■own objects of research at the expense of higher organism, even to 

 the extent of imagining all protoplasm to be essentially bacterial in 

 composition, or, again, that the plasma of higher animals exists in a 

 state of symhiosis with bacteria in all the tissue-units : they suggest, 

 for example, that no tissue is aseptic, that mitochondria are really 

 bacterial in nature, and that such substances as vitamines are the 

 product of symbiotic bacterial action (Portier, 1917). 



It is easier to start such hypotheses than either to prove or 

 disprove them, and in the present volume M. Lumiere proceeds to 

 demolish the views put forward by Portier. Cultures of bacteria 

 from tissues of the frog and guinea-pig show that such germs exist 

 only as saprophytic or parasitic forms, more or less in a resting-stage, 

 in the internal organs. Injections of bacterial cultures in the vege- 

 tative condition are rapidly cleared from the blood and tissues. 

 Isolated resting-stages on culture prove to be common innocuous 

 forms with no special attributes. The relation of the host and 

 parasite is not so much a symbiosis as a fight in which the higher 

 organism, as such a term would imply, is quite competent to look 

 after itself. 



The work is of interest to botanists, since conceptions of a very 

 similar state of S3a-nbiosis in plant-forms, as in the case of root- 

 tubercles and endotrophic mycorhiza, are apt to be somewhat over- 

 done. In all such relations among higher plants the '* symbiosis " is 

 of very restricted nature, only helpful to the host when ending 

 in the death and digestion of the intruder. In other respects the 

 idea of bacterial plasma existing within the cytoplasm of the host 

 lias much in common with older and exploded theories of the myco- 

 plasm of parasitic fungi. A very useful Hst of literature is 

 .appended. 



A. H. C. 



