The Action of Chlorophyll in the Vine. By Giovanni Briosi. 285 
and their curvature forms a more or less marked semicircle. Two 
are directed to the front and the external border (le bond externe). 
Three others are seen in the outer border, but they are directed 
backwards. Between these two series are placed the hooklets of 
the second form (les crochets de la deuaieme forme). The latter 
are placed regularly upon the inferior borders of the tarsal ex- 
tremity, and are nine in number. They are short, and their initial 
part assumes up to the point of its insertion a more or less spatular 
form. Towards their summit they curve brusquely upwards, and 
terminate in a very short conical point. They are all equal in 
their length, which does not exceed a third of the preceding ones. 
Finally, the feet are covered with hairs analogous to the long 
ones on the body, but much shorter and more transparent. 
By all the characters that I have pointed out, this acarite 
appears to belong to the Gamasidx, to which certainly belong the 
adult forms represented in the present state of our knowledge by 
the undeveloped stage of certain Gadflies—Journal de l Anatomie, 
December 1876. 
1V.—On the Action of Chlorophyll in the Vine. 
By Giovanni Briost, Engineer and Director of the Agricultural 
Station in Palermo.* 
One of the grandest conquests in the realm of modern botanical 
physiology, since it concerns the most fundamental phenomenon 
of life, is, without doubt, the discovery of the assimilating function 
of chlorophyll by which it forms starch out of the carbonic acid 
of the atmosphere and water, under the action of the light. As 
is known, it was the work of Mohl, Gris, Bohm, Sachs, Nageli, 
Kramer, Kraus, &¢., which led to this discovery, which has often 
since been confirmed. Consequently it is at present generally 
admitted that the starch is, at least amongst the vegetable sub- 
stances which are known to us, the primary form of the organic 
material of plants, out of which the laboratory of nature derives by 
transformations partly understood, and partly unknown to the 
chemist, all other physiological allied substances, as sugar, dextrine, 
inulin, cellulose, fat, &e. 
In another work,j I have pointed out that the product of the 
assimilation process of chlorophyll in some plants cannot be starch, 
* Translated from the Italian by W. R. 
+ Briosi, “ Ueber normale Bildung von fettartiger substanz im Chlorophyll” 
(‘ Botanische Zeitung,’ 1873, No. 20 and following ones); also ‘ Nuovo Giornale 
Botanico,’ April 1875. 
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