90 NOTES AND MEMORANDA. 



pretatiou given by M. J. Perez of his observations is not what it 

 ought to be. In a hive of which the queen was, he says, the daughter 

 of an Italian of pure race and had been fecundated by a French male, 

 he examined with scrupulous care 300 males. He found Italian 

 characters in 161 ; hybrid characters in varying degree in 66, and 

 French characters in 83. From which it follows evidently, he adds, 

 that the eggs of drones, like the eggs of females, receive the contact 

 of the semen deposited by the male in the organs of the queen, and 

 that the theory of Dzierzon, which was created to explain an ill- 

 proved fact, becomes useless if this fact is disproved. 



We are not at all struck by the evidence of such a conclusion, 

 being in a position to interpose the known laws of heredity. With 

 an Italian queen of incontestably pure race, the drones have ex- 

 clusively Italian characters, although she may have j)aired with a 

 male of another race. The workers alone are hybrids. The author 

 has evidently had before him a case of reversion. In his hive there 

 was, according to what he informs us, some true Italian workers, 

 others which were French, others presenting a mixture, in different 

 proportions, of the characters of the two races. This is conformable 

 to the usual results of crossing. The queen of this hive was doubtless 

 an Italian of the same kind as that of the workers of the first 

 category. The atavism of a black male who had intervened in a 

 preceding generation was manifested in different degrees. The same 

 fact is often shown in the hives of Germany or of France in which 

 Italian queens have been introduced. I remember having myself 

 made a similar observation in that of M. Bastian, at Wissembourg, by 

 proving the hybrid origin of the queen whose external characters 

 were otherwise purely Italian. 



In any case, the parthenogenesis of bees cannot be considered as an 

 hypothesis admissible only by reason of its utility to explain a fact 

 otherwise incontestable, since its reality was established by experi- 

 ment long ago. 



New Classification of the Vegetable Kingdom. — Professor Caruel, 

 of Pisa, proposes the following classification : — (1) Phanerogam ia {in 

 the subdivisions discarding the distinction between Gymnospermia 

 and Angiospermia, retaining as the two primary classes Monocoty- 

 ledons and Dicotyledons, and giving the higher rank to the former). 

 (2) Schistogamia (including Characece only). (3) Prothallogamia 

 (vascular Cryptogams divided into HeterosporcB and Isosporoi). (4) 

 Bryogamia (synonymous with Miiscinece, and divided into Miisci and 

 HepaticcB). (5) Gymnogamia (Thallophyta or cellular Cryptogams), 

 The simplest Gymnogamia possesses only a single form, which is 

 reproduced organically by fission, by conidia and sporidia, or by 

 gamogenesis, but without any sexual differentiation. In others there 

 is sexual differentiation into male and female forms ; a few have also 

 a third neutral form, when the oospore produces zoospores instead of 

 passing directly into the female form. They resemble the Bryogamia 

 in the definite development of the neutral form and the indefinite 

 development of the female form, but differ in the zoospore-like form 

 of the phytozoa, and in the structure of the oogonium, which is iso- 



