Prof. G. Gulliver on Raphides. 21$ 



Adopting Lord Bacon's recommendation to review our know- 

 ledge and transplant it into the minds of others as it grew in 

 our own, it may be proper to mention here how the importance 

 of raphides as natural characters became evident to me. During 

 many years I have been making dissections under the micro- 

 scope, and notes of the results, of every native plant collected 

 in my country excursions. These researches were undertaken 

 mjiinly for the purpose of comparing the intimate structure of 

 plants and animals, and of learning incidentally what good 

 diagnoses might thus be found between nearly allied orders and 

 species. In the natural sciences, the study of difference or con- 

 trast is more difficult and scarcely less important than the study 

 of resemblance or analogy ; and the complaint of Lord Bacon 

 (Works, 4to, vol. i. p. 68) of the comparative neglect of differ- 

 ence in anatomy is still applicable to modern science. Since 

 the discoveries of Schleiden and Schwann, important advances 

 have been made in both directions, including the valuable 

 characters afforded by the bone-cells and intimate structure of 

 the teeth of animals, as expounded by the late Prof. Quekett, 

 the late Mr. Nasmyth, and Mr. Tomes. And I have long ago 

 shown (Appendix to Gerber's Anatomy, 1842) that there are 

 animals which may not only be distinguished by their red cor- 

 puscles alone from other species of the same order, but from those 

 of every other order, of the vertebrate subkingdom ; nay, that the 

 most universal single diagnostic between the two chief divisions • 

 of that subkingdom is in the blood; that is to say, while a 

 nucleus regularly exists in the red corpuscle of oviparous verte- 

 brates, that nucleus is as regularly wanting in the red cor- 

 puscle of Mammalia : and hence the designations Vertebrata 

 Pyrenjemata and Vertebrata Apyrensemata (Hunterian Oration, 

 1863, p. 20; and College Lectures, reported in ' Med. Times/ 

 1862-63). 



Excepting the diagnoses of a few orders as Coniferse, Orchi- 

 dacese, and Onagracese) by the woody tubes and pollen, we find 

 little use made, in systematic and descriptive botany, of the dis- 

 tinctions alS^orded by intimate structure between the subdivisions 

 of Vasculares. Hence the orders, genera, and species seemed 

 to require further research, especially as regards tlie characters 

 which might appear in modifications of size, form, structure, 

 and functions of the cells, and in the properties of the juices. 

 The latex (Annals, March 1862), hairs, pollen- and other cells were 

 sometimes found available in this way. But these observations 

 had not long been prosecuted before examples were often found 

 of the truth of Schleiden's remarks as to how little hope there 

 is, without a study of the fundamental principles of develop- 

 ment, of much further aid to systematic botany from mere ana- 



