SHORT NOTES 113 



number of poplar trees that Mr. A. Bruce Jackson and I agree to 

 be similar in leaf characters to the tree that has been named Populus 

 deltoidea x nigra var. hetulifoUa. The true glabrous P. nigra 

 grows on Putney Heath, probably planted : elsewhere, as about 

 Horsley and Ockham, I have only seen the var. hetulifoUa. Agri- 

 monia Eupatoria var. sejjiiim grows in a thicket near Wimbledon 

 Common. On Littleworth Common is a form of Sagina pro- 

 cumhens strikingly unlike the usual form, as the flowers are mostly 

 pentamerous and the petals are quite half as long as the sepals. 

 Galium erectum x verum, near Leatherhead. Centaurea pratensis 

 Thuill : I refer to this, after comparing them with continental 

 specimens, plants gathered in several Surrey localities, Chelsham, 

 Leatherhead, New Maiden, etc. Within the past two years, 

 Azolla filiculoides has become established on a pond at Lower 

 Morden. — C. E. Britton. 



Ne-w British Galls (p. 27). — Mr. E. W. Sw^anton mentions 

 four species of Willows on which " witches' brooms " occur, but 

 they may be seen on two other species in Kew Gardens at present, 

 namely Salix pjentandra and S. hahylonica var. annularis. These 

 galls have been familiar and conspicuous objects on Willow^s on 

 Hampstead Heath for some four years now, and S. hahylonica seems 

 to become more and more infested each season. — H. Boyd Watt. 



Did Doody observe the Oogonia of Fucus ? — Tancred 

 Eobinson writes to Eay, under date August 24th, 1686 (Correspon- 

 dence of Bay, ed. Lankester, p. 187) — "The other day I and Mr. 

 Doody (an apothecary here) had occasion to go five or six hours 

 down the river . . . near Gravesend. We observed in the 

 long broad vesicles at the end of the leaves of the Fucus maritimus 

 latifolius vulgatissimus [Fucus vesiculosus] , many small dark 

 round bodies adhering to the inner membranes, which contained 

 a mucous liquor : whereas the round bladders in the other parts 

 of the leaves w^ere void of liquor, and of those dark solid globules, 

 which gave Mr. Doody and myself reason to fancy that this plant 

 abounds with seed, which upon drying, disappears." It may be 

 remembered that at this period Hooke and Grew had made the 

 use of the compound microscope familiar to Fellows of the Eoyal 

 Society, even if Doody and Eobinson could not have detected the 

 oogonia or antheridia of Fucus with the naked eye. After this 

 observation — as in the Dillenian Synopsis (1721), p. 41 — the 

 extremities of the fronds are termed " summitates seminiferae " 

 and the swollen portions, " tuberculi seminales." It seems as 

 if Doody and Eobinson anticipated by more than a century the 

 observations of Major Velley [Marine Plants, 1795) and Stackhouse 

 (Mem. & Corresp. of Sir J. E. Smith, i, 416-7), though not the 

 more complete results of Carmichael (circ. 1822, unpublished ; see 

 Berkeley, Introd. Crypt. Botany, p. 231) and Thuret (1851).— 



G. S. BOULGER. 



Viola alpina Huds. Fl. Angl. 331 (1702).— Turning over a 

 volume of the Botanical Magazine, I dropped upon the following 

 note in the description of Viola hifiora (t. 2089) : " Clusius men- 



Journal of Botany. — Vol. 54. [April, 1916.] k 



