136 MICROSCOPICAL COLLECTIONS IN FLORIDA. 



is fully perfected. The castor oil plants grown in our climate 

 during one short season, will furnish very little spiral tissue, 

 mostly spotted ducts and scalariform cells. There is no more 

 beautiful object for multiple staining than thin longitudinal sec- 

 tions through the woody fiber, the vascular tissues, and the pith 

 cells of the castor oil plant. I will briefly describe my process 

 of making these stainings. After being decolorized in chlorin- 

 ated soda, the sections may be left for half a day or more in a 

 solution of carmine in water containing a few drops of aqua am- 

 monia; then for half an hour in a rather weak solution of 

 extract of logwood in alum water, and finally 10 to 15 minutes 

 in a weak solution of anilin violet or blue in alcohol. From 

 this they can be carried through absolute alcohol into turpentine, 

 and mounted in balsam at any time thereafter. If successful in 

 this staining you will have the pith cells in red, the spiral tissue 

 in blue, the wood cells in purple and the stellate crystals in green 

 or yellow. 



But the chief objects of interest to the microscopist in the 

 vegetation of Florida, are the insectivorous plants. Not only 

 are they more abundant and, as I think, more perfectly developed 

 in the central lake regions, of Florida, but some varieties are 

 found there different, it seems to me, from any found elsewhere. 

 I desire particularly to mention one which I discovered, and 

 which perhaps might be entitled to rank as a new species. 



In a lagoon-like basin at the side of a small lake near Lake 

 Harris, in water from two to three feet deep, I found numerous 

 specimens of the insectivorous plant known as the Drosera or 

 sun-dew, growing thriftily and floating about among the scattered 

 water-weeds, without any attachment whatever, indeed with very 

 little root of any kind, the dead leaves that hung down in the 

 water seeming both to buoy it up and to hold it upright. This 

 plant differs from all the described species of Drosera, so far as 

 I have been able to ascertain, in having an upright, leaf-bearing 

 stem from four to five inches long, in floating free on the water, 

 and in having unusually long, vigorous and numerous leaves. 

 As I never found this floating Drosera in any other location, and 

 as there was an abundance of the ordinary Drosera longifolia 



