42° Prof. G. Gulliver on Raphides. 
not only of the importance of raphides, but that they have been 
hitherto strangely neglected in systematic botany. Indeed they 
afford such a weighty and essential natural character, often 
available when all other diagnostics are utterly inapplicable, 
and so truly expressive of the intimate economy of the plant, 
that it must henceforth claim an eminent place in the deserip- 
tions of any flora, and still more so in every true history of the 
vegetable kingdom. 
Liliacee.—But very extensive observations are yet wanting to 
enable us to define peremptorily the distribution and exact value 
of raphides in this point of view; for though we have seen that, 
as far as regards the British plants yet examined, certain orders 
are as constantly raphidiferous as others are not so, there are 
still different orders, some of the members of which produce 
raphides regularly and abundantly, and others either irregularly, 
scantily, or not at all. Thus, of the order Liliacez, some of the 
species abound in raphides, and others are devoid of them. In 
the following examples, careful examinations were made, and 
they are confined, in this paper, when not otherwise expressed, 
to the leaves, for the sake of equal comparison. Raphides were 
not found in Tulipa sylvestris, Fritillaria Meleagris, Lilium Mar- 
tagon, L. candidum, L. aurantium, Allium Scheenoprasum, A. ur- 
sinum, A. Cepa, and A. Moly; while raphides were always found 
in Ornithogalum umbellatum, Scilla verna, 8. peruviana, Endymion 
nutans, Muscari racemosum, Tritoma media, and several species of 
Yucca. 
Such an irregular distribution of raphides in the members of 
one order might lead us to suppose that the fact must be con- 
nected either with season, climate, or soil,—which, I believe, is 
not entirely the case, because in some (though not all) of the species 
mentioned the constancy of the results was verified under many 
such conditions. Several of the plants were examined more than 
once from various localities, and during different seasons and 
years; while Allium ursinum and Ornithogalum umbellatum were 
particularly made the subjects of repeated and protracted ob- 
servations, and always with the same results of no raphides in 
the former and an abundance of them in the latter species. 
Besides, any true raphidiferous plants, as Hpzlobium and many 
-others, will always be found abounding in raphides ; while, on 
the contrary, there are many entire orders which I have repeatedly 
searched in vain for raphides. In fact, this presence or absence 
of raphides is alone a sufficient diagnosis between some species 
of the order Liliacee. It will probably be objected that the 
Onion, now marked as a plant not characterized as raphidiferous, 
is the very one so often given by botanical writers as an example 
of a raphis-bearing species. But the crystals which have been 
