3°2 



NA TURE 



[January 29, 1903 



PROF. LADISLAV CELAKOVSKY. 

 A FTER a long and painful illness, due to a serious 

 ** internal malady of many years' standing, Prof. 

 Celakovsky, the well-known and brilliant botanist, passed 

 away at Prague on November 24, at the age of sixty- 

 seven. 



It was with the morphological department of botanical 

 science that Celakovsky chiefly identified himself. 



His papers dealing with evolutionary problems appear 

 to date from the year 1868 with the memoir "On the 

 General Evolution of theVegetable Kingdom." The theses 

 "On the Different Forms and the Meaning of the Alter- 

 nation of Generations in Plants" (1874) and "On the 

 Threefold Alternation of Generations in the Vegetable 

 Kingdom" (1877) appear to us to afford so adequate a 

 solution of this great subject as to cause wonder that 

 botanists should still vex their minds by discussion of 

 it. Two treatises which must long keep his memory 

 green, while helping to establish the supremacy of his 

 genius, are those on " The Law of Reduction in Flowers" 

 (1894) and on "The Evolution of the Flower," in two 

 parts (1896 and 1900) ; at the latter end of the second 

 part, an interesting discussion and, in our view, a probable 

 solution of the of late much-debated phenomenon of j 

 "double-fertilisation" in Angiosperms is introduced. 1 

 These works of our author are, we fear, far too little 

 known or appreciated.. 



To many botanists, Celakovsky will be best known by 

 his voluminous writings, published in many and various 

 periodicals, on the morphological nature of the ovule, a 

 subject which occupied his attention from 1S74 onwards 

 and which his surpassing talent completely illuminated. 

 Both in this and other difficult cases, he relied almost 

 entirely on teratological evidence for the final solution of 

 the problem. It is this position, well brought out in his 

 memoir in Lotos of 1874, "On the Relationship between 

 the Different Methods of Morphological Research," 

 which caused so much opposition to him from fellow- 

 workers in the same fields. 



During the latter part of his career, Celakovsky per- 

 formed the enormous service of what we consider to be 

 the complete unravelling and elucidation of the nature 

 of the female flower in Coniferae, a subject hitherto 

 utterly obscure and bristling with difficulties, but now, 

 to our mind, entirely solved once for all. The author's 

 views are contained chiefly in "Die Gymnospermen " 

 (1890) and " Nachtrag zu meiner Schrift liber die 

 Gymnospermen" (1897). 



Another important field of botanical research yielded 

 scope for the display of his great powers, viz., that con- 

 nected with the building-up of the stem and its members. 

 Three of the principal papers treating of this subject 

 are "On Terminal Members" (1876), "On Cases of 

 Branching Underlying the Phytostatic Law" (Pring- 

 s/nim's Jahrbiicher, vol. xxxii.) and "The Segmentation 

 of the Stem"(i9oi). The latter is an elaboration and 

 wide expansion of the bare principles laid down long ago 

 by Gaudichaud, and revolutionises all modern concep- 

 tions of the subject. 



Many memoirs have, of necessity, been left un- 

 noticed in this brief sketch ; suffice to add that what 

 appears to have been the last paper published by him, 

 at leiast in German, was that on "The Cortication of the 

 S'em by Leaf-bases,'' which appeared in 1902. 



W. C. \Y. 



NOTES. 



We published last week the wireless telegram sent by Presi- 

 dent Roosevelt to the King and also His Majesty's reply thereto. 

 This latter message was not sent by wireless telegraphy, the 

 reason being lhat at the time it was dispatched the nearest tele- 

 graph office to Poldhu was closed, and so it was impossible to 



no. 1735, VOL - 6 7] 



get the message to Poldhu, though its transmission from there 

 to America could have been easily effected. The Timet of 

 Monday deals with this difficulty in a leader, and points out 

 that the Post Office as a public institution ought immediately to 

 afford the facilities of connection between Mullion and Poldhu 

 for which the Marconi Company asks. It is only a matter of 

 erecting a couple of miles of telegraph line and providing for a 

 continuous service, and this should certainly be done without 

 any delay. The Post Office is said to be " considering the 

 matter, " but in the interests of the public and in fairness to 

 the Marconi Company, the "consideration" ought to be cut 

 short and the necessary connection made at once. As the Times 

 rightly says, any questions of the ultimate trustworthiness and 

 utility of the wireless system or of our telegraphic relations 

 with the cable companies or other States have nothing to do 

 with the Post Office, at any rate at the present time. All they 

 are asked to do is to provide facilities fur telegraphing to a 

 customer likely to make large use of them. It is sincerely to be 

 hoped that the Post Office will realise that it owes it as a duty 

 to the public to remove immediately this purely artificial 

 hindrance to the development of what may possibly be a great 

 commercial enterprise. Such action would be impossible in 

 any other country. 



An influential committee has been formed in Rome to lake 

 measures to honour the memory of Father A. Secchi, S.J., the 

 distinguished astronomer and meteoiologist, on the occasion of 

 the twenty-fifth anniversary of his deaih, which occurred on 

 February 26, 187S. The president of the commiitee, Father 

 G. Lais, S.J., vice-director of the Vatican Observatory (ad- 

 dress, Via Torre Argentina, 76, Rome), will be glad to add the 

 names of scientific men and institutions to the list of those 

 interested in this celebration. Father Secchi was for many 

 years director of the observatory of the Collegio Romano, now 

 occupied by the Italian Central Meteorological Office, and his 

 well known meteorograph was erecied there in iSjS. It 

 was in connection with this observatory that almost all Secchi's 

 work was done in solar and terrestrial physics. He published 

 several volumes of the Memorie dell' Osservatorio del Collegio 

 Romano, 1852-1863, and began, in the year 1862. the 

 Bolletino nuteorologico, of which seventeen volumes appeared, 

 and contained many valuable discussions by himself and others. 

 The Italian Spectroscopic Society owes its foundation to his 

 energy. He was the author of numerou, papers and also of 

 books on the sun, the stars and the unity of physical forces. 



Pkoi". E. B. Poulton, F.R.S., has been elected president 

 of the Entomological Society for the session 1903-1904. Prof. 

 Poulton has nominated as vice-presidents the Rev. Dr. Fowler, 

 Prof. Meldola, F.R.S., and Dr. D. Sharp, F.R.S. 



At a general meeting of the Linnean Society on January 15, 

 it was resolved to take the necessary steps to obtain a supple- 

 mentary charter embodying certain alterations in the constitu- 

 tion of the Society. A motion was carried in favour of adding 

 the words " without distinction of sex " to the existing para- 

 graph of the charter referring to the admission of fellows, so 

 that when the supplementary charter has been obtained, women 

 will be eligible for election into the Society. 



On Saturday, January 24, a cone 800 feet in height is re- 

 ported to have been blown off Mont Pelee by a volcanic 

 eruption. 



A telegram, through Reuter's Agency, received at New 

 York from Kingstown, St. Vincent, states that an eruption of 

 the Soufriere occurred at noon on January 22. A whirling, 

 incandescent cloud was seen to shoot from the volcano clear 

 into the sky, followed by a black cloud, which rapidly ascended 

 to a great height and was visible throughout the island. Sand 

 fell at Chateau Belair. 



