14 Chapters in Modern Botany chap. 



desired, and the preparation mounted permanently for the 

 collection, either simply in glycerine by putting a ring of 

 asphalt or gold size around the cover-glass edge, or by 

 mounting in glycerine jelly. Sufficient technical skill and 

 experience to make very fair botanical preparations will be 

 found to come very rapidly with practice, especially if the 

 beginner can obtain a practical start from any more 

 experienced student or amateur ; the help of any work on 

 the microscope is often of much value, although there is 

 nowadays a bewildering wealth of technical devices, each 

 no doubt useful in its own way, like the numberless 

 refinements of the microscope itself, yet like these quite 

 unnecessary' until skill has been reached and special 

 problems undertaken. 



Australian Pitcher Plant (Cephalotus). — Another 

 pitcher plant, farther-fetched than Darlingtonia, and less fre- 

 quent in cultivation in our greenhouse collections — indeed 

 one of the rarest and most peculiar plants in the world 

 — is the curious little Australian pitcher plant Cephalotus 

 follicularis^ which occurs only in a small area not far from 

 the capital of Western Australia. It is by far the smallest 

 and least impressive of all the pitcher plants, yet is of 

 some beauty, and also of morphological interest in pos- 

 sessing at once ordinary leaves and well-formed pitchers 

 between which no gradations normally exist. In the large 

 collection of pitchered and other insectivorous plants in 

 the Edinburgh Botanic Garden the late Professor Dickson 

 (than whom these interesting forms have never had a more 

 keen and thoughtful student) was able to collect and figure 

 an interesting series of the monstrous leaves which occa- 

 sionally arise, and thus to show that the pitcher is but a 

 specialised modification of the ordinary leaf, a first em- 

 br}'onic dimple near the point deepening backwards and 

 downwards into a pouch, the hd thus arising on the side 



