500 BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, ETC. 



One of the boldest statements we have seen for some time is 

 that at the foot of a picture of a group of Pyrethnim uluiinosum in 

 the Sketch for Nov. 10 — "Old-fashioned Michaelmas Daisies, from 

 which many of our Chrysanthemums have been derived " ! 



Mr. James Goldie, of Guelph, Ontario, has just published 

 privately the diary of the expedition on foot through Upper 

 Canada, undertaken by his father, John Goldie, in 1819. We 

 gave some account of Goldie's life in this Journal for 1886, 

 pp. 272-4 ; the present elegant little brochure is of interest, not 

 so much from a botanical standpoint — Goldie's botanical journal 

 was destroyed by fire — as for the information it contains as to the 

 features of the country visited. An excellent portrait forms a 

 frontispiece to the little volume. 



At the opening meeting of the Linnean Society on Nov. 4, Sir 

 John Lubbock read a paper "On the Attraction of Flowers for 

 Insects," which dealt chiefly with the points raised in three recently 

 published memoirs by Prof. Plateau, who had attempted to show 

 that the scents and not the colours of flowers serve to attract 

 insects. Sir John Lubbock explained that his view, like that of 

 Sprengel and Darwin, was that to insects flowers were indebted for 

 both their scent and colour. Not only had the present shapes and 

 outlines, colours, the scent, and the honey of flowers been gradually 

 developed through the unconscious selection exercised by insects ; 

 but this applied even to minor points, such as the arrangement of 

 lines, and the different shades of colour. Prof. Plateau had recorded 

 a series of experiments on the dahlia, in which he showed that bees 

 come to these flowers even when the ray-florets have been removed. 

 Discussing this point, Sir J. Lubbock said it was somewhat singular 

 that he should have selected as proving that insects are entirely 

 attracted by scent a flower which had, so far as he knew, no scent 

 at all. He gave several reasons for disputing the conclusions drawn 

 by Prof. Plateau from his experiments, and recorded others made 

 by himself which refuted them. He had sele?ted species of flowers 

 in which ihe scent is in one part and the coloured leaves in another, 

 as, for instance, the Eri/m/ium amethystimim. This flower is sur- 

 rounded by brilliant blue bracts ; and he found that if the two 

 parts were separated, the bees came more often to the bracts than 

 they did to the flowers themselves. He maintained, therefore, that 

 the observations of Prof. Plateau did not in any way weaken the 

 conclusions which had been drawn by Sprengel, Darwin, and others, 

 and that it was still clear that the colours of flowers serve to guide 

 insects to the honey, and in this way secure cross-fertilization. 



The third fascicle of the Messrs. Linton's " Set of British 

 Hieracia," which has just been distributed, contains, as its pre- 

 decessors, a majority of endemic forms. Fourteen numbers, com- 

 prising eight species and six varieties, are found only in the British 

 Isles. Of the rest, five occur in Scandinavia and six in other parts 

 of Europe. The following note accompanies the fascicle: — " i?. 

 jjetiolatiun, referred to in Mr. Hanbury's ^lonograph, p. 28, is fairly 

 abundant in Glen Derry, at between 2000 and 3000 ft. alt., where 



