54: Prof. G. Gulliver on Raphides. 
the British Flora, unless when expressly extended beyond it. 
Of every order in Prof. Babington’s ‘ Manual’ I have examined 
at least one species, often more, and sometimes the whole or 
nearly the whole; and whenever raphides were found in any 
order, all or the greater part of its species were manytimes dili- 
gently searched, as well as those of the orders between which the 
raphis-bearing one might happen to stand. But as it was fre- 
quently difficult for me to procure more than one specimen of a 
plant, and still less easy to get every species of an order, and to be 
sure of avoiding errors, these practical applications will be now 
described provisionally, and yet not without a belief that their 
utility and naturalness are likely to remain after a much more 
complete series of valid tests than I have been able to apply. 
The subject, even as limited in this paper, is so extensive as 
to require for its full elucidation the cooperation of many 
labourers in different parts of the kingdom; and any botanist 
who may choose to try the reality of the raphidian character of 
such an order as Onagracer may quickly and easily do so in 
some of the most common plants throughout our country. 
In the last communication, additional evidence was given of 
the validity and practicability of this character in Galiaceze, and 
that it is at least as remarkable in Balsaminaceze and Onagracez. 
Now these three are the only orders of our Dicotyledones that 
can yet be truly characterized as raphis-bearers,—a fact which 
I have already found very useful in cases where no other bota- 
nical diagnosis was available. And hence, until this raphidian 
character be proved either defective or more extensive, whenever 
a British plant of that class be found abounding in raphides, it 
must be referred to one or other of those three orders. 
But this conclusion will appear so paradoxical, rejecting the 
raphis-bearing character of many trees and shrubs which are 
commonly cited by authors as special examples of it, opposed 
also to the current views on the subject generally in our best 
works on phytotomy and to the neglect of it particularly in those 
of systematic botany, that a few explanatory remarks may here 
be repeated. 
When Schleiden states that “the needle-formed crystals, in 
bundles of from twenty to thirty in a single cell, are present in 
almost all plants,” we can only certainly say that they must 
be very difficult to detect, if ever present at all, in many entire 
orders of British plants, and that, though the conclusion of such 
an eminent observer is not to be lightly treated, it cannot yet 
be reconciled with the facts so often disclosed in the course of 
the present communications. 
Other statements, apparently coinciding with that of Schleiden, 
when carefully examined both by their context and by the light 
