Prof. G. Gulliver on Raphides. 213 
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 tome. 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 
mainly 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, 4:to, vol. 1. 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 
Pyrenemata and Vertebrata Apyrenzemata (Hunterian Oration, 
1863, p. 20; and College Lectures, reported in ‘ Med, Times,’ 
1862-63). 
Excepting the diagnoses of a few orders as Conifers, Orchi- 
daceze, and Onagracez) by the woody tubes and pollen, we find 
little use made, in systematic and descriptive botany, of the dis- 
tinctions afforded by intimate structure between the subdivisions 
of Vasculares. Hence the orders, genera, and species seemed 
to require further research, especially as regards the 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- 
