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slowly produced, and they were accompanied with marked enlarge- 
ment of the pupil. 
Value of Botanical Histology to the Medical Student. 
‘Tllustrations of the Value of Botanical Histology to the Medical 
Student and Practitioner ;’ by Dr. Lindsay, Assistant Physician to the 
Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries. 
The author stated that the origin of this paper was due to the fact 
that there existed among the medical students of the Edinburgh 
University a strong feeling that they are compelled by the curriculum- 
regulations to learn too much of the collateral sciences of Natural 
History, Chemistry, and Botany,—Botany being, in particular, a 
science, the knowledge of which is regarded as quite unnecessary for 
the practice of their profession. The idea that the study of the scien- 
tific or theoretical disqualifies to a certain extent from the acquire- 
ment of practical knowledge, is a fatal error, and he believed that 
every Professor of the University could bear testimony to the fact that 
those students who had distinguished themselves in one department 
of their academic curriculum, generally did so equally in every other. 
Dr. Lindsay’s object in this communication was merely to lay before 
such sceptics the results of the short experience of one but lately a 
student—of one who had been at the same time a scientific and a 
“»ractical man ;” and to point out more especially by a few illustra- 
tions the value of microscopical Botany to the general practitioner. 
Some considerable time ago, Dr. Lindsay had been applied to by a 
distinguished chemist to make a microscopical examination of some 
raw tobacco, with a view to the detection of any adulteration, the 
question at issue being a céjarge of adulteration, made at the stance 
of Her Majesty’s excise against a wholesale tobacconist, on the 
ground of adulteration. The matter came to a public trial, in which 
Dr. Lindsay gave evidence. He found that the tobacco was genuine, 
from the nature of the hairs of Nicotiana, which have an apical gland, 
from the arrangement in a semi-lunar form of the spiral vessels of 
the leaf-stalk, as seen in a cross section, and from the number and 
appearance of the stomata. The surface of the leaves was covered in 
some places with very minute silvery crystals; in others with a dark 
viscid gummy matter, on the nature of neither of which could His- 
tology, per se, throw a decided light. Instead of tobacco, the sub- 
stance presented to Dr. Lindsay for examination might have been 
scammony, senna, mustard, or any other drug of vegetable origin; and 
he thought that, in such a case, the botanist was the only fit person to 
