Ixiv. president's address. 



Botany. 



Probably all who have ever had to do with gardens are 

 aware that different seeds vary very much in the time they 

 take to germinate, from the mustard and cress which when 

 children we used to put on damp flannel before the fire in 

 the fond hope that it would spring up in a night, to such 

 seeds as Canna, which, enclosed in a verj^ hard skin, take 

 months. A paper on some experiments in germination of 

 278 seeds was lately read before the Royal Dublin Society, 

 hawthorn taking a year and a-half. I am not aware that 

 the question of the dormant state in which some seeds are 

 believed to remain for many years when deeply buried has 

 ever been satisfactorily solved, but certainly when new 

 ground is turned up, fresh plants do sometimes appear either 

 from freshly imported or long dormant seeds. Another 

 recent set of experiments was detailed to the Linnean Society 

 on the pollination of hardy fruits. Strawberries can produce 

 good fruit without the aid of insects — raspberries, currants, 

 and gooseberries require them. In some fruits a flower 

 cannot be fertilised with its own pollen but requires pollen 

 from another blossom or even another tree. 19 only out 

 of 65 apples were self fertilising ; in pears four out of 30 ; 

 in plums 21 out of 41 ; in cherries 5 out of 12. Thus it 

 might happen that in a garden containing only a few apple 

 trees, all might be sterile from this cause. Of 3,000 insects 

 visiting various fruit blossoms, 88 per cent, were hive bees, 

 5^ per cent, humble and other wild bees, and 6^ per cent, 

 flies and other insects, which last chiefly ate the pollen and 

 did not carry it usefully to other flowers. In a botanical 

 garden, so far as I have seen them, it is generally attempted 

 to grow all sorts of flowers, whatever their natural habitat, 

 and the difficulties incident to this are more or less overcome 

 by greenhouses, heated to various temj)eratures, ponds, &c. 

 But in Japan a botanical garden for the Alpine flora has been 

 lately established in the mountains, thus providing the natural 

 habitat of the plants in a way Avhich could not well be done 



