Institute of France. 59 



of plants knovi'n by the names of compositce, syngeneic fp, and 

 synaTiiherice; in which he has discovered several peculiarities 

 hitherto unknown. No botanist, for instance, had remarked 

 the articulation which se])arates the thread in the vicinity of the 

 anthera, a character which INI. de Cassini has found to be much 

 more constant than that of the union of the antheree among 

 themselves. Me promises to give us his observations on the 

 corolla, the ovary, the pericarp, and the seed ; and as it cannot 

 be doubted that he has paid the same attention to these inquiries 

 as to his foriner comrauuications, no family of plants will be so 

 well described. Botany may expect much from such a student, 

 if, after having minutely described a family so natural that we 

 may almost regard it as a great genus, he should exercise his 

 sagacity in these equivocal families, whose varied characters 

 render tlieir limits uncertain. 



Vegetable physiology, like all the other branches of science, 

 presents abundance of these difficult questions, of which nature 

 does not furnish an evident solution, and winch will long continue 

 to be an object of discussion among botanists. 



Such, among others, is the question respecting the existence 

 of the sexes in the plants knov.'n by the name of the cryptoga- 

 muus. Many botanists, disappointed by the difficulty of discover- 

 ing their organs, concluiled that these vegetables might exist 

 without sexes, and propagate by bulbs or simple buds, as well as 

 certain animals, such as the polypi, whose reproduction certainly 

 takes place in this way. Others, on the contrary, struck with 

 the complication of the apparatus for reproduction in the ferns, 

 the mosses, &c. could not believe that a kind of propagation so 

 simple as that of the buds could have rendered necessary organs 

 so multiplied and various. They endeavoured therefore to dis- 

 cover the stamens, the pollen, the pistil, the seed-, the embryos, 

 and all the agents of fecundation, which are so palpable in ordi- 

 nary plants ; but as the analogy of form quits them, although 

 thev are united as to the principle, they diverge in its applica- 

 tions. Thus, what one takes for the pollen, another regards as 

 the seed, and vice veriu ; so that these sexnalists (as they are 

 called) have no fewer disputes among them than their common 

 adversaries, or the agdviiils. 



In former rejxnts we have noticed these disputes. The pre- 

 sent year has revived one respecting the great work of M. Des- 

 vaux, on the family of the lycopodia. We know that these 

 plants (recently separated from the other mosses by botanists), 

 carry in small capsules a yellowish dust very combustible, which 

 is well known by the name of powder of lycopodium, and which 

 ib used for various purposes. Its resemblance to the powder of 

 the anthers made M. de Beauvois regard it as a true pollen. 



According 



