1866. ] Botany and Vegetable Physiology. 261 
plants, formerly described as rare, were becoming plentiful. This 
change of the American flora was attributable to the spread of rail- 
way communication. Some of the botanists present thought that 
the foreign flora would supplant the native in a, comparatively 
speaking, very short period. . 
France.—In the ‘ Bulletin Générale de Thérapeutique, Jan. 
15, 1866, M. Stanislaus Martin describes a new medicinal plant called 
in Brazil Jurubeba (Solanum paniculatum), which is sold there com- 
mercially in the state of leaves, fruit, and roots. The plant is used 
in the form of emplastrum, syrup, wine, tincture, aqueous and 
alcoholic extract. It is chiefly employed in affections of the liver 
and spleen, in vesical catarrh, anemia, chlorosis, and difficult men- 
struation. According to reliable testimony, this new drug promises 
to be the most powerful deobstruant yet met with. 
Pumpkin-seeds are again in France popular with the profession 
as a remedy for tape-worm. M. Bouvier, in the ‘ Archives Médi- 
cales Belges,’ relates his successful treatment of a little German boy 
five years of age, and Dr. Desnos reports two cases in the ‘ Journal 
de Chimie Médicale. Dr. D. says that the results are still more 
favourable when the resinous extract of male fern (Aspidium filix- 
mas) is combined with the pumpkin-seed preparation. ; 
At each session of the French Academy, January, 1866, M. Ad. 
Chatin read a botanical paper. In the first, “On the Tendrils of 
the Cucurbitaceze,” read January 2, 1866, M. Chatin states the facts 
as revealed by the microscopic examination of the anatomy of the 
tendrils, simple and branched, of the different genera of the order, 
and compares them with the microscopic anatomy of the other organs 
of the plant—vzz. stem, leaf, petiole, peduncle, roots ordinary and 
adventitious, and deduces from them the following results :—1. The 
tendrils of the Cucurbitaceze are of axile origin (either a branch or 
apeduncle). 2. If the tendril is simple, its homology is invariably 
with the axile organs; if, on the contrary, it is branched, its 
divisions correspond sometimes to the leaves and _ occasionally 
to the axile organs. 3. There is no relation of origin between 
the tendril and the ordinary roots; there is, however, a relation 
existing between the tendril and the adventitious roots. In his 
paper, read January 15, “On the Existence of a Third Membrane 
in Anthers,” M. Chatin says, the opinion generally adopted amongst 
botanists is, that the valves of anthers are composed of two mem- 
branes, which were named by Purkinje exothecium and endothectum, 
But there exists always during a certain phase of the development 
of the anthers, a third membrane, more interior than the endothe- 
ciwm, which is the true endothecium. The endothecitum of Pur- 
kinje should therefore now be denominated the mesothecium. The 
development of the cells of this third membrane and that of the 
pollen cells takes place together up to the period of the maturation 
