HO THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



wings and parachutes to seeds and fruits, though they may serve 

 accidentally in aiding short-distance, or even long-distance, dis- 

 persal, do not always do so, and were not originally developed for 

 this end. In this view he is professedly following Goebel ; but 

 Benthani had brought forward the same argument years before in 

 reference to the Com/posit®. 



The insistence on the comparison of a ripe dry fruit with a 

 shrivelled, and not with the merely ripe and still juicy, succulent 

 fruit, may prove of some importance ; while the distinction 

 between capsules and legumes — that the former dehisce and dry, 

 while the latter dry and dehisce — is certainly so ; but we own to 

 having hoped for more from chapters headed " The Homologies of 

 Fruits." Has it ever, for example, been demonstrated by an 

 adequate developmental study that Brazil-nuts are true seeds and 

 not endocarps '? Such systematic descriptions of the ripe fruits 

 as occur in Miers's papers on the Lecythidacese are, of course, by 

 no means conclusive. We merely throw out a query for Dr. 

 Guppy, or some other worker in the tropics. 



Most attractive descriptions of the variety of colour in the 

 seeds of plants seen in Jamaica and in Devonshire convey little 

 suggestion as to any explanation of this variety, neither does 

 Dr. Guppy mention one striking instance among plants familiar 

 to British botanists, the turquoise seeds of Impatiens biflora 

 Walt., nor, curiously enough, the lilac testa of the ivy, though he 

 gives an admirable illustrated account of the development of the 

 ruminate perisperm and embryo in the latter. We remember a 

 gathering of botanists some years ago being a good deal puzzled 

 by a quantity of these seeds dropped down a chimney by starlings. 



As to the interesting point of the very varied rest-period of 

 seeds and the generalization, which Dr. Guppy quotes from the 

 late Mr. Hart, of Trinidad, that most tropical seeds have a very 

 fugitive vitality, it seems obviously probable that longevity, an 

 acquired character most desirable in more temperate climates, is 

 not so much needed where seed-production, like the other stages 

 of plant-life, is hardly restricted to any one part of the year, and 

 that it has, therefore, not in these cases been acquired. 



One hardly expects side-lights on systematic botany from such 

 researches as these ; but the conclusions (p. 487) that green coty- 

 ledons occur generally among the DisciflorcB of Bentham and 

 Hooker, and (p. 482) that Bidens tripartita L. is a dry-condition 

 form of B. ccrnua L. will interest others than physiologists. 



Dr. Guppy is, perhaps, a little ahead of our modern tacticians 

 when he suggests (p. 17) that an army is to be led by its airmen, 

 though many previous thinkers have proclaimed that the dreamers 

 are the leaders of the world. After the interesting array of carefully 

 ascertained facts which he has provided for us, it w T ould, we 

 suppose, be churlish to grudge him his flights of fancy in his 

 final chapter, even if we fail to find any great gain in considering 

 the seed as adapted to lunar or other " cosmic " conditions, while 

 the full-grown plant is " more conditioned," so as to be merely 

 11 terrestrial." f , a „ 



G. S. BOULGER. 



