136 THE JOUKNAL OF UOTANY 



BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, etc. 



Newspaper Botany. The Daily News, which, as our last issue 

 showed, occupies a prominent position among botanical blunderers, 

 writes on April 12 that •' wajside hedgerows and wastes are now 

 getting to the stage when it is hardly p( ssible to do anything but 

 catalogue the wild flowers." The list given, however, is not ex- 

 tensive, but it includes the " white tormentil," with which we are 

 not familiar. It also tells us that the wild arum is " readj^ to supply 

 the cuckoo, when it comes, with a drink " : according to the old folk- 

 name, cuckoo-pint, it serves this useful purpose — a reference to Prior's 

 Popular Names will dispel this illusion. On the following day in 

 an article on " vegetables that grow wild," wherein various strange 

 things were mentioned — e.g. "wild asparagus," which "we find 

 in the young shoots of certain ferns — the royal fern is the really 

 good one." There is also ^^ Anthyllis arvensis, honourably known 

 to Oulpeper and the medical herbalists of to-day as parsley piert " ; 

 this grows in " dome-like clusters of tightly-packed green, rapidly 

 reaching the dimensions of a football ; you pull up each boss by the 

 roots and soon have an armfull or even a cart load, which you can 

 try and sell to the makers of liver- medicines, or your armfull you can 

 boil for dinner." The writer adds " I have not yet tried it that 

 way " ; perhaps some of our readers can report. 



But newspaper botany is likely to be eclipsed by the magazines, 

 if the following, from Nash's Magazine for March (p. 537), which a 

 corres})ondent sends us, may be taken as a sample : — " The hemlocks, 

 clothed from head to foot in thin smoke and exquisite foliage, caught 

 his attention. Usually they had the power to arouse his enthusiasm, 

 for he considered them the most beautiful of all conifers. Now they 

 reminded him only of the fact that Socrates had ended his troubles 

 with a bowl of hemlock. He wondered if it could have been the 

 same kind of hemlock. He thought not." We also think not. 



At the meeting of the Linnean Society on Aj)ril 15th, Mr. R. 

 Paulson showed lantern-slides illustrating deKnite stages in the 

 sporulation of gonidia within the thallus of the lichen Evernia 

 Fnmastri Ach. He stated that it has for a considerable time been 

 generally accepted that the bright-green spherical gonidium, which is 

 common to many lichens and is referred to in the literature of the 

 subiect as Cgstococcas, Protococctis, or Pleurococais, multiplies 

 vegetatively only, while it remains the algal constituent of the lichen 

 thallus. Famintzin (1868), Baranetzki (1S68), Woroiiin (1872), 

 Bornet (1873), and Chodat (1913), state that the gonidia (Cgsfo- 

 eocctts ?) of certain lichens produce zoospores after being isolated 

 from the gonidial layer and subsequently cultivated in, or on, different 

 media. He had not been able to find that the gonidia of Evernia 

 Prunastri and of twenty-three other species of lichens, representing 

 eleven o-enera, divide vegetatively within the thallus, but in all these 

 cases the reproduction of gonidia was found to be the result of the 

 successive bipartition of the original protoplast of the cell into four, 

 eight, or sixteen separate masses each of which rapidly develops a 

 cell-wall of its owai while within the mother cell. These daughter 

 o-onidia (suppressed zoospores ?) ultimateW escape as the mother-cell- 

 wall becomes diffluent. They exhibit all the characteristics of the 

 parent cell before they are set f]-ce. 



