1864. | Botany and Vegetable Physiology. 113 
addition to tho trite vessels which contain the proper juices of plants, 
and which may either be long rigid tubules without anastomoses, or 
thin flexuose, and branching, with frequent inosculations, there are 
certain reservoirs or utricles, and others in the form of intercellular 
passages (or meati), which present themselves in the form of slightly 
branching vessels, constituting now and then a sort of framework 
around cells—and some of which are simply irregular cavities pro- 
duced by laceration. In another communication, M. Lestiboudois 
enlarges on the subject, and adds that this imperfect vascular system is 
not met with in the generality of plants, nor in all parts of the plant 
in which they occur—nor, therefore, is the laticiferous juice an essen- 
tial element in the growth of plants. M. Lestiboudois refuses to 
recognize two categories of coloured juices, essentially differing from 
one another,—the one special, scented, and excrementitial, and the 
other vital and alimentary ; and further, is of opinion that the terms 
latex and laticiferous vessels should be abolished, because they per- 
petuate an erroneous idea, by assigning to plants those centralized 
functions which they do not really possess, but which are peculiar to 
animals, 
Tt is always an interesting matter to receive confirmation of 
the natural affinities of structure in groups which have already, 
from a general community of characters, been arranged by botanists 
in what are termed natural orders; and the researches of Mr. 
Gulliver among the minute crystals called raphides existing among 
the tissues of some plants tend to this result. Mr. Gulliver has 
distinguished the acicular crystals (or true raphides) from another 
class of crystals which occur among Phanerogamia, commonly in 
a more or less globular congeries, either naked or within a cell, and 
which he proposes to call Spheraphides. The distribution of this 
latter class of crystals appears to be especially characteristic of the 
Caryophyllacez, Geraniacez, Paronychiacee, Lythrace, Saxifragee, 
and Urticacez, so that he has never failed to find them in a single spe- 
cies of these orders. But inasmuch as he further believes that few, if 
any, orders could be named in which Spheraphides do not exist, it is 
questionable how far they might be available as botanical characters. 
With true raphidian tissue, however, the case is different ; they occur 
so regularly and plentifully in some plants, and so sparingly or not at 
all in others, that they afford good characters by which certain orders 
may be readily distinguished from their allies of other orders. Thus 
if we confine the word raphides to the needlelike crystals commonly 
occurring in bundles, it may be the expression of a more universal 
diagnosis between such orders as the Onagracez and their next allies 
(and yet no less simple and sure), than any single character hitherto 
employed ; and we could determine the affinities and contrasts of 
certain plants by a method at once easy and practical, and in the ab- 
sence of those parts heretofore exclusively used for the descriptive 
distinctions. Mr. Gulliver speaks in a later communication thus 
strongly :—“ No other single diagnosis for the orders in question is so 
simple, fundamental, and universal as this ; and the orders to which 
VOL, I. I 
