1896 NOTES AND COMMENTS. 15 



Douglas, Fortune, names familiar to botanists if only from their 

 frequent commemoration in generic or specific names, were only three 

 of the Society's most zealous and successful collectors. Don collected 

 •extensively on the West Coast of Africa, and afterwards in South 

 America and the West Indies. To Douglas, who visited North 

 America, and especially the Pacific coast, we owe the introduction of 

 many conifers — the Douglas Pine {Pseudo-Tsuga Douglasii) from British 

 Columbia, Finns Lamhevtiana, P. insignis, P. pondevosa, and others; 

 among shrubs the familiar flowering currant, and many well-known 

 garden flowers besides — Gilias, Clarkias, Godetias, lupines, Esch- 

 scholtzias, etc. To Fortune, who went to China in 1842, we owe the 

 •" Chusan Daisy," the parent of our Pompon chrysanthemums; the 

 Japanese anemone, Weigelia, and that pretty spring flower the Dielytra. 

 Fortune also made careful observations on tea cultivation, and subse- 

 quently entering the East India Company's service, by his experi- 

 ments in the north-west provinces of India, laid the foundation of the 

 tea-growing industry in India and Ceylon. John Reeves, who had 

 visited China more than twenty years before, sent home the beautiful 

 Wistaria sinensis, of which the original plant is still growing in the 

 Society's garden at Chiswick. 



We cannot enumerate the glories of the Temple Show. There 

 were quaintly marked tulips, glaring begonias, soft - coloured 

 •carnations, and a bewilderingly bright bank of orchids — one lady 

 thought "there was something almost spiritual" about the latter. 

 But the prettiest thing, in our opinion, was a Httle Alpine garden 

 arranged by Backhouse, of York. In spite of the fact that plants 

 were rather mixed, the Californian Darlingtonia and Calochovtus with 

 European gentians, it looked like a little bit of nature that had got in 

 by mistake. 



Henry Woodward on Crustacea. 



In Dr. Henry Woodward's Presidential Address to the Geological 

 Society, a vast amount of learning is compressed into the twenty- 

 eight pages which deal with the " Life-history of the Crustacea in 

 later Palaeozoic and in Neozoic times." Those at all new to the 

 subject will be astonished at the wealth of genera and species now 

 known of fossil Malacostraca, and at the distant dates to which the 

 familiar groups of crabs and crayfishes, of shrimps and woodlice, can 

 be traced back. In the period of the Greensand, an isopod, resembling 

 the well-known Bopyvns now living, had already learned to take up its 

 lodging free of rent in the carapace of a prawn. The well-tasting 

 Squilla mantis of the Mediterranean has its recognisable ancestry in 

 the Coal Measures, in the Chalk, in the London Clay. The palaeon- 

 tology of Crustacea, as it is more and more investigated, promises to 

 be full of instruction in regard to the slow, the far-stretching, the 

 complicated evolution of life. Unfortunately the fossil remains of this 

 class are often very obscure in many of the details that would seem 



