78 NATURAL SCIENCE [February 



can be assimilated. For details of the experiments, we refer the 

 student to the short paper in the Annals. He will, however, be 

 relieved to hear that, for the present, Pasteur's theory of the vital 

 fermentation in yeast must still be retained, since, at any rate in the 

 case of English yeasts. Prof. Green has found it impossible to extract 

 an active ferment. Death of the plant still means loss of power to 

 excite fermentation. 



In this same number, Prof. Vines returns to the investigation of 

 the excretion found in the pitchers of the pitcher-plant {Nepenthes). 

 Since Sir Joseph Hooker first showed, in 1874, that cubes of white 

 of egg, fragments of meat, and pieces of fibrin are eaten away or 

 completely dissolved by immersion in the pitcher, several observers 

 have taken up the subject, and two opposite views have been held. 

 In 1877 Prof. Vines showed an important analogy between the 

 pitchers and the gastric mucous membrane of animals, by obtaining 

 from the secreting areas of the pitcher wall a glycerine extract which 

 had a distinct digestive action on fibrin, and indicating its origin from 

 a zymogen formed in the cells and subsequently decomposed by the 

 action of acids. More recently a French and a Eussian observer 

 have denied the presence of an active ferment, and declared that 

 the disappearance of proteid matter when placed in an open pitcher 

 is merely a putrefaction set up by bacteria which have been intro- 

 duced. Goebel, however, criticised adversely these conclusions, and 

 now Prof. Vines brings additional evidence which confirms his 

 original conclusion, that there is set up in the pitcher an active 

 process of digestion by a proteolytic ferment formed in the gland- 

 cells of the walls. One of his most conclusive experiments shows 

 that digestion is set up by a glycerine extract of the pitcher in a 

 solution containing 1 per cent, of prussic acid, and he suggests, with 

 some reason, that the onus probancli may now be considered to rest 

 on the exponents of the other theory, who must bring forward a 

 bacterium capable of digesting fibrin in such a solution, and of 

 retaining its digestive activity when kept for several weeks in pure 

 glycerin. 



The Jamaica Botanic Gardens 



The Botanical Gazette for last November contains an interesting 

 account of the Public Gardens and Plantations of Jamaica by the 

 Director, the Hon. William Fawcett. The paper was prepared for, 

 but owing to a delay not read before, the recent Toronto meeting of 

 the Botanical Society of America. The aboriginal name of the 

 island was, we are told, Xayraaca, denoting " a land covered with 

 wood, and watered by shaded rivulets." The differences in elevation 

 from sea level to the Peak (7400 feet), the varying exposures to 



