SHORT NOTES 223 



conclusions have sometimes been criticised as narrow or 

 amateurish, it is beyond dispute that in his published botanical 

 works Lord Avebury has brought together a considerable mass 

 of facts — the result of much careful observation. The most 

 important is the book on Seedlings, a standard work in which are 

 minutely described and carefully figured the form or structure of 

 the seeds and seedlings of a large number of species arranged in 

 their genera and families in systematic order. The book contains 

 a wealth of information, and has been freely drawn upon by sub- 

 sequent writers. 



The volume on Buds and Stipules, which appeared in the 

 International Scientific Series, is an interesting account of the 

 methods of bud-protection and the nature and uses of stipules in 

 a number of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants. Lord Avebury's 

 last important botanical work, Notes on the Life-history of British 

 Flowering Plants, which appeared in 1905, was an attempt to 

 supplement the more technical British Floras by notes on the 

 life-history of the plants. While admittedly incomplete, the book is 

 a useful and suggestive companion to the severely systematic Flora. 



Lord Avebury also communicated botanical papers on similar 

 lines to the Journal of the Linnean Society (of which he was 

 President from 1881-1886), and quite recently published in the 

 Eoyal Microscopical Society's Journal the results of a long series 

 of observations on the form of the pollen in numerous species of 

 flowering plants. 



A notice of Lord Avebury's services to botany would be in- 

 complete without some reference to the great interest, both per- 

 sonal and as a trustee, which he took in the Department of 

 Botany of the British Museum. He was strongly opposed to the 

 dismemberment of the Natural History Section by the separation 

 of its botanical side. 



A. B. R. 



SHORT NOTES. 



The Myrrh Plant. — The identification of the myrrh plant 

 was for many years a vexed question, arising from the difficulty 

 of obtaining good flowering or fruiting specimens. In Bentley & 

 Trimen's Medicinal Plants (t. 60) the fruit figured does not belong 

 to the plant illustrated. The illustration of the plant given (t. 355) 

 by Nees under the name of Balsamodendron Myrrha in Beschreib. 

 off. Pflanz. 1829, right-hand figure, shows the fruit attached, and 

 is correct, agreeing perfectly with specimens of the plant brought 

 for me by Mrs. Lort Phillips, from Somaliland, together with 

 pieces of the bark of the same tree with true myrrh attached to 

 the bark. When, however, Prof. Engler superseded the genus 

 Balsamodendron by Commiphora, and published a Commiphora 

 Myrrha Engl, from Arabia, which he expressly states is not 

 aromatic, and yields no resin, and so obviously could not be the 

 source of the myrrh of commerce, further confusion was created. 

 Of this tree he describes a variety, " Mol-mol," which corresponds 



