308 THE JOUENAL OF BOTANY 



I grasped what no one else seems to have seen, i. e. that the Bennet- 

 titese are not Gymnosperms at all, but Angiosperms, and that to 

 derive the modern Angiosperms from them on the principles which 

 for some time past we have been setting up and laying hold of is as 



easy as A.B.C The idea which has been putting us and other 



people off, is looking for the ancestry among Cycads (as used for 

 recent plants), all ideas being too much warped by narrow notions 

 derived from these modern things." 



Professor von Wettstein, of Vienna, proposed and arranged the 

 translation of "The Origin of Angiosperms" into German, and it 

 appeared in the Ost. Bot. Zeitschr. in 1908. He wTote concerning 

 the paper, — -"As I have been occupied for some years with the same 

 question, I know how to appraise its great worth, although I represent 

 totally different views." The trouble taken by the Austrian pro- 

 fessor to give publicity to a theory which I'an altogether counter to 

 his opinions, deserves to be placed on record as a remarkable instance 

 of scientific broad-mindedness. It is perhaps of some interest that 

 the portrait of Arber which accompanies the present notice is repro- 

 duced from a drawing made in 1907, the year in which " The Origin 

 of Angiosperms " was written and published. In 1908 Arber and 

 Parkin produced a second instalment of their joint studies, in the form 

 of a paper on the relationship of the Angiosperms to the Gnetales 

 (Ann. Bot.). 



Any attempt to summarize those qualities which characterized 

 Arber as a researcher must include a reference to his boundless 

 capacity for work and to his power of envisaging problems broadly 

 and in true perspective. But perhaps the feature of his mind which 

 had the most individualizing effect on his output, was his faculty of 

 analysis, which was so highly developed as to be at times actually 

 burdensome to him. The chief thing he asked of a mental recreation 

 was tliat it should be of such a nature as to give rest to the critical 

 faculty and, in his own Avords, " to take the strain off." " A highly 

 critical spirit" he wrote, "is one of the gifts or faults of my 

 character, whichever way you like to put it. I am one of those 

 unha})py people who suffer themselves to hear for a time an orchestra 

 as a whole, but prefer quickly to bring into play the faculty of hear- 

 ing each separate instrument and seeing how the total effect is built 

 up. This power of analysis or criticism (using the latter in a wide 

 sense) is exhausting . . . and involves much brain work." 



Newell Arber's work was indeed cari'ied o\it at the white heat 

 implied by these last words. In the space of a relatively short life 

 he had exj^erienced far more of the pleasure and also of the pain of 

 research than often falls to the lot of the biologist — even if he 

 reaches and passes his three score years and ten. 



A. A. 



NEW KUBIACEi^] FROM THE BELGIAN CONGO. 

 By H. F. Wernham, D.Sc, F.L.S. 



Of the ])huits described in the present paper, seven were collected 

 in 1914 in the Equatorial district of the Belgian Congo by A. Nannan, 



