993 



leys, springs up on ihe thinnest strata of sandy soil, and even clings 

 firmly to the clefts and fissures of bare rocks. Unfortunately, its 

 development comparatively seldom attains a high degree of perfec- 

 tion ; the loose hold taken by its slender roots of the porous soils or 

 rocks, rendering it extremely liable to suffer from the winds, here so 

 prevalent. 



" Many of the Hartz inhabitants, and especially the juvenile por- 

 tion of them, obtain a livelihood by collecting wild forest fruits {e. g., 

 the bilberry, strawberry, raspberry, edible Fungi, &c.), seeds of forest 

 trees (particidarly the birch, beech, oak, and fir), German tinder (' Feu- 

 erschwann,' i. e., Boletus igniarius), and various officinal herbs (which 

 are in great repute in domestic medical practice in Germany), and by 

 preparing ' Birkenwasser,' and other cooling liqueurs, from the sap of 

 the forest trees." 



Characters of the Natural Order Solanaceee. 



A paper by Thomas Anderson, Esq., ' On the Characters of the 

 Natural Order Solanaceae,' was read. 



The author stated that his object was to bring before the Society 

 the subject of a new arrangement of the Solanaceae, by which Mr. 

 Miers proposes to divide that order; and, after giving the characters 

 of his two divisions, to endeavour to adduce a few reasons, drawn 

 from a consideration of the chemical constitution and physiological 

 actions of the plants, for adopting this new classification of the family. 



Dr. Robert Brown, forty-four years ago, in his ' Prodromus Florae 

 Novae Hollandiae,' hinted that certain genera of the Solanaceae should 

 either be excluded, or be placed in a separate section, the nucleus of 

 a new order. His remarks, however, were confined to the tribe Ver- 

 basceae only, now placed, by some botanists, among the Scrophula- 

 rineae. Again, Mr. Bentham, author of the monograph on the Scro- 

 phularineae, in the tenth volume of De Candolle's ' Prodromus,' placed 

 as a tribe of that order the Salpiglossideae, till then coupled with the 

 Solanaceae. Notwithstanding these and other attempts to arrange 

 properly these orders, the confusion still existed ; and it has been left 

 to Mr. J. Miers to propose what seems to me to be a very rational and 

 proper way of surmounting the difficulty, namely, by establishing a 

 new natural order, intermediate with the Solanaceae and Scrophula- 

 rineae, and intended to include the anomalies of both. The following 

 is the substance of the characters of these two orders, and the inter- 

 posed one, as Mr. Miers has given them : — First, the true Solanaceae, 

 with a gamosepalous calyx, 5- (rarely 4-) partite border, the lobes of 



