1 1S THE JOTIiN AT, Of BOTANY 



e worl 



jnsects, in connection with which he published valuabb 

 i; H ? ub S hed ' in conjunction with Benjamin Carrihgton, i 

 -tlora of the West Biding, for which he undertook the phanerogams 

 and m which he had the assistance of. J. C. Baker. » As a naturalist 

 lie was imbued with the spirit of Gilbert White, and was an en 

 thusiast for what he called 'live natural history.' This spirit was 

 most highly evinced in his two remarkable books Bound the Tear 

 and Souse, Garden, and Field, as well as in a scholarly edition of the 

 Natural History of Selborne ; his book on Object- Lessons from 

 Mature Us done much to place nature-study on a sound scientific 

 basis of close observation of nature." In 1871 Miall was appointed 

 Curator to the Museum of the Leeds Philosophical Societv • five 

 years later he became the first Professor of Botany in the Yorkshire 

 College of Science, and continued in that office in the University of 

 Leeds until 1907. He then retired to Letchworth, where lie pub- 

 lished an excellent account of The Early Naturalists and their 

 11 ork, which is noticed in this Journal for 1913 (p. 62). 



At the meeting of the Linnean Society on Feb. 17, Dr Rendle 

 cead a communication from Prof. G. B. De Toni, entitled "A Contribu- 

 tion to the Teratology of the Genus Datura L." Prof. De Toni 

 described a hitherto unreported malformation of the flower of Datura 

 Stramonium. A plant grown in the Botanical Garden at Modern 

 produced flowers of two kinds ; normal flowers appeared on the lower 

 part of the plant and produced perfect capsules, but flowers produced 

 in the upper part of the plant later in the year were remarkably 

 difterent. In these the calyx was large and leaf-like, and inflated 

 recalling the ventricose calyx of Physalis ; the corolla was absent or 

 represented only by small green structures; and the androecium and 

 gyrcecuim were reduced to inconspicuous barren rudiments. 



At the same meeting Mr. Ramsbottom gave some account of a 

 collection of plants made by various members of H.M. Salonika 

 Forces. Mr. A. J. Wilmott pointed out that the main interest of 

 the collection, apart from the value of the material from this Little- 

 known region, lay in the features of endemism which the Macedonian 

 ilora exhibited. Endemics are said to be both numerous and abundant, 

 which seems to be true so far as one can judge in a poorly explored' 

 area. A series of specimens of interest was exhibited, including 

 several forms believed to be new to science. It was pointed out that 

 bilene jHvenahs is a common plant in Macedonia ( = S. subconiva ), 

 and that its occurrence on the reopened silver mines at Laurion in 

 Greece, is not surprising ; Heldreich's suggestion that it had sprung 

 up trom seed which had been dormant 1500-2000 years may be 

 dismissed. Glaucium Serpieri Heldr., of which the same was postu- 

 lated, is not most nearly related to an Asia Minor or Persian form 

 but is either a variety of G.flavum as Halacsy places it, or a local or 

 endemic form. Dr. Rendle considered the collection, which extends 

 to about 4000 sheets, as the best of all service collections, and of 

 great importance as allowing a fairly intensive studv of a definite 

 area. 



On the same occasion Dr. G. C. Druce q-ave a sbort account of 

 botanical work in the Shetlands, and showed a Plantago from the 



