SHORT NOTES 287 



I learned that this pasture had been browsed by sheep for " at least 

 40 years " since it had been ploughed ; and it was never mown until 

 this year. This doubtless explains why the plant had never been 

 noticed, or at least recorded, from a place within 200 yards of the Sidcot 

 School premises and through which generations of young naturalists and 

 not a few older botanists must have passed. Already by June loth 

 the flowers had largely disappeared \^\t is well known to blossom at least 

 three weeks earlier than Mollur/o) ; and on August 1st I could not 

 find a trace of even the leaves. The short grass had been mown a 

 fortnight earlier, and a horse was now in possession. Such plants as 

 Cniciis acaulis, however, threw a further liglit on the cultural history 

 of that pasture. Apparently certain Bedstraws are appreciated by 

 stock, especially in dry weather. The day after my discovery I was 

 surprised to find patches of good G. erectum in grass left to be mown 

 on both sides of the private drive to Newcomb, Sidcot, a quarter of a 

 mile on the other side of the School. This drive was made some 

 12 years ago, and was cut out of a pasture grazed by cows. 1 regard 

 the Sidcot locality and that on a Lias pasture near Washford in the 

 west of the county as the most satisfactory stations for Galium, 

 ei^ectum in the whole of the Bristol and Somerset area.— H. S. 

 Thompson. 



Hypericum humietjsum (pp. 195, 225). The notes on the 

 distribution of this plant lead me to record that on 9th Sept. I saw 

 it in great quantity in a gravelly field on a hillside in the neighbour- 

 hood of Newton Abbot, S. Devon. The abundant flowers gave quite 

 a tinge of colour to the upper part of this field, which was at the edge 

 of a dense wood, and bracken -bordered. The form was a somewhat 

 diminutive one, which might be accounted for by the position, ex- 

 posed to strong sunlight, and by the very dry season. — C E. Larteh. 



EEVIEWS. 



Lectures on Sex and Heredity, delivered in Glasgow, 1917-18, by 

 F. 0. Bower, J. Graham Kerr, and W. E. Agar. Macmillan 

 & Co., London, 1919; 16mo, pp. vi4-119. Price 5s. 



A CLEAR understanding of the mechanism of reproduction is 

 admittedly of primary necessity to biologists and economists of every 

 grade, and this pleasant little production epitomizes much of modern 

 views. The word ' ' sex " is still commonly used to cover two distinct sets 

 of phenomena : (1) syngamy, the fusion of two gamete nuclei to give a 

 new individual — a phenomenon of fundamental importance as leading 

 to consequent meiosis with its differentiation of inheritance and new 

 possibilities of racial variation, with nothing " male " or " female " 

 about it, the latter terms being merely human conventions, as applied 

 to phenomena of (2) heterogamy and the differentiation of sexual 

 characters — as a set of factors concerned solely with the secondary, 

 post-syngamic, nutrition of the zygote, and its further consequences 

 as expressed in " maleness " and "femaleness." 



Such phenomena in the botanical kingdom range from the simplest 

 isogamy, and even complete absence of nucleogamy, to advanced 

 heterogamy with manifold secondary diiferentiations, as also the 



