Xll 



observations, by an examination of the objects themselves, is attended 

 with considerable labour, and requires a large share of patience and 

 perseverence ; and as it is highly important that a premature judg- 

 ment on this most interesting question should not appear in the pages 

 of the ' Phy tologist,' I feel confident that my readers will pardon what 

 may appear an uncalled-for delay in the completion of a literary 

 notice. The theory has been condemned on the continent by Schlei- 

 den, and adopted in this country by a reviewer in a Quarterly 

 Journal of Medicine; but from a perusal of the judgment pronounced 

 by both these writers I am led to doubt whether either has possessed 

 the means of testing Sumin ski's accuracy. A difficulty presents itself 

 on the very threshold of the inquiry. Suminski describes certain 

 actions as taking place within a cell, the walls of which are fleshy 

 and perfectly opaque. Now it is remarkable that neither his advo- 

 cate nor his detractor explains how they obtained a view of the inte- 

 rior; neither does anything they have written justify the conclusions 

 at which they have respectively arrived. 



On a former occasion I expressed an opinion in favor of those 

 papers which record the observations made during a botanical 

 ramble. I entertain precisely the same opinion of them still. I 

 consider that such papers afford an agreeable and convenient mode 

 of communicating our thoughts to a larger circle than can be reached 

 by a private letter ; and the points to be kept in view in penning 

 them, are, first, to render them instructive, by making known new 

 stations, pointing out geological relations, restricting or extending 

 the supposed range of variation in a species, and, in fact, adding in 

 any manner to our previous knowledge ; and, secondly, by never 

 reciting as discoveries such stations for plants as were previously 

 generally known, unless it be with a view of recording that the 

 species still exists in the described locality. It would not be difficult 

 to select from the pages of the ' Phytologist' localities recorded as 

 new, although they have previously appeared in ' English Botany,' 

 the ' British Flora,' both ' Botanist's Guides,' and ' Cybele Britannica.' 

 This seems to me objectionable, and certainly implies a want of 



