608 
NANOT SLE. 
[OcroseEr 10, 1899 
subjects, of which a candidate may take up two, and in each of 
which 2000 marks may be made. 
Botany is taught at Coopers Hill, and (according to the 
Calendar of the College) it forms one of the ‘‘ special auxiliary 
subjects ” for the forest student. I do not wish to say a single 
word in depreciation of the botanical teaching at this college, 
which is probably excellent of its sort. I do not know what 
value, as part of their professional equipment, students are ac- 
customed or encouraged to attach to the possession of the means 
of acquiring a knowledge of the trees and shrubs in the midst 
of which they are to pass their lives in India. But this I do 
know, that the ordinary forest officer educated in England now 
arrives in India without sufficient knowledge to enable him to 
recognise from their botanical characters the most well-marked 
Indian trees. To tell such an officer the name of the natural 
family to which a plant belongs conveys no information to him 
whatever, for he knows nothing of botanical affinities. More- 
over, the forest officer after he has arrived in India is not en- 
couraged to familiarise himself with the contents of the forests 
under his charge. This will be better appreciated by giving an 
example than by any number of remarks. Some three years 
ago, Mr. J. S. Gamble (a forest officer) published a monograph 
of the bamboos of British India. From bamboos, as you may 
possibly be aware, a very large amount of forest revenue is 
annually derived. The sales of bamboos for the year 1896-97 
amounted to no less than 110 millions of stems. A great 
number of the species of bamboos have the curious habit of 
flowering gregariously at remote intervals of thirty or forty 
years, and the flowering is followed by death. The absence 
from the forests for years in succession of flowers of a number 
of the species, and the similarity of many of them in leaves, 
had hitherto made members of the group most difficult of identi- 
fication. Mr. Gamble had devoted himself to their study for 
many years. Ife had carefully examined all the previously col- 
lected materials stored in the herbaria at Kew, the British 
Museum, Calcutta and elsewhere ; and large special collections 
had been made for him by Mr. Gustav Mann and other officers 
of the Government. Moreover, he had General Munro’s great 
paper in the Linnean 7yazsactéons asa basis. Mr. Gamble’s 
work was undertaken with the full approval of Sir Joseph 
Hooker, who indeed accepted Mr. Gamble’s account of the 
bamboos for his ‘‘ Flora of British India.” Mr. Gamble’s 
monograph is illustrated by a life-sized drawing of each species, 
wih analyses of the flowers on a larger scale. When com- 
pleted, the book was published as one of the volumes of the 
** Annals of the Calcutta Botanic Garden.” In consideration of 
the supposed great importance of the book to the forester, and 
in the belief that the copies would be eagerly taken by the Forest 
Department, an extra hundred copies were printed, and these 
hundred copies were put into stout canvas binding suitable for 
camp use. These copies, or as many of them as he cared to 
take, were offered to the head of the Forest Department in India 
at the reduced price of fifteen rupees per copy. The result was 
an official refusal to buy a single one, although the purchase of 
the whole hundred (which was not asked for) would have cost 
only fifteen hundred rupees—a sum which would have reduced 
the revenue of the year by about one twelve-thousandth part ! 
An appeal against this ruling having been made to a sul higher 
authority, a modified order was subsequently issued permitting 
such forest officers as desired to possess the book to buy copies 
and charge the cost in their office expenditure. I may state that 
the book was not a private venture. It was produced at the 
expense of the Government of Bengal. 
It is not because I like to play the censor that I have made 
these remarks about the Forest Department. Having myself 
served in it from 1869 to 1871, I can speak from my own ex- 
perience as to the value, from the utilitarian point of view, of a 
knowledge of the names, affinities and properties of the trees, 
shrubs and herbs which compose an Indian jungle, and of a 
knowledge of these as individual members of the vegetable 
kingdom rather than as masses of tissue to be studied through 
a microscope. The appointment which I held in India for 
twenty-six years after leaving the Forest Department gave me 
full opportunity of getting into touch with all who interest them- 
selves ina knowledge of plants, and of discovering how few of 
these at the present day are forest officers. The majority of the 
atter, if they love their trees, are content to do so without know- 
ng their names or relationships! There are, of course, splendid 
exceptions who know as well as love. The general decadence 
of the teaching of systematic botany in England during the past 
NO. 1564. VOL. 60] 
twenty years is, perhaps, to some extent the cause of the low 
estimation in which the science is held by the authorities of the 
Indian Forest Department. Twenty-five years ago systematic 
and morphological botany, no doubt, had too great prominence 
given to thcm in the teaching at universities and colleges of this 
country, and the other branches of botanical science were too 
much neglected, although I do not think they were despised. 
Nowit appears to me that systematic botany is too much neglected. 
I hope it is not also despised! Few of the systematists who 
survive in England are now to be found attached to the univer- 
sities. They are mostly clustered round the two great herbaria 
in London ; and such of them as have to look to systematic 
botany for the means of livelihood are not in the receipt of 
salaries such as one might reasonably expect in one of the richest 
countries in the world ! 
CHEMISTRY AT THE BRITISH 
ASSOCIA TION. 
ESPITE the fact that the Dover meeting was a compar- 
atively small one, the chemists formed a thoroughly repre- 
sentative gathering, including amongst distinguished foreigners 
Prof. Lemoine, of Paris; Prof. Fittig, of Strassburg ; and Prof. 
Ladenburg, of Breslau. The able address of the President, 
Dr. Horace T. Brown, on the assimilation of carbon by the 
higher plants, which embodied most valuable and original con- 
tributions to the knowledge of the complex changes which go 
on in the living cell, introduced a subject somewhat beyond 
the usual scope of the proceedings of the Section ; and whilst 
the chemists present at Dover will always look back upon the 
address with a special appreciation, they will be equally mind- 
ful of the many interesting contributions on kindred subjects 
for which the personality of the President was in the main 
responsible. Prof. Hanriot, the President of the Chemical 
Section of the French Association, communicated a short ac- 
count of the excretory products of plants, in which he dis- 
cussed the mutations of nitrogen in the vegetable kingdom 
as based on his own observation of the occurrence of asparagine 
amongst the secretions of plant roots ; when passed into the soil 
this product would in all probability become oxidised to nitrates, 
and thus become directly available for plant life. The experimental 
confirmation of this view is in course of study. The chemical 
processes involved in the saccharification of starch by malt- 
diastase were discussed by Dr. A. Fernbach, of the Institut 
Pasteur, and by Dr. G. H. Morris. The former detailed his 
observations on the influence of acids and of some salts on 
saccharification, which led him to the conclusion that the 
slightest trace of any free acid retards the action of diastase on 
gelatinised as well as on soluble starch, provided both the 
starch and diastase are free from salts on which the added acid 
may act; but if the solution contains salts, such as secondary 
phosphates, which are distinctly unfavourable to diastatic action, 
the addition of acid is favourable as long as there is no excess 
over the quantity necessary to transform these salts into the 
primary phosphates. ‘he President regarded these results as 
opposed to his own observations on the subject, and considered 
further details of the experiments necessary to justify the con- 
clusions. Dr. G. H. Morris, in a paper on the combined action 
of diastase and yeast on starch granules, showed that similarly 
to the symbiotic action of diastase and yeast on the so-called 
stable dextrin, ungelatinised intact starch granules, when 
submitted to the joint action of diastase and yeast, are fermented 
toa large extent, the maltose first formed being converted into 
alcohol. The addition of a small quantity of yeast to a cold water 
malt extract more than doubles the percentage of starch that is 
changed, and this increased action is not due to any greater 
activity of the diastase that might result from the removal of 
the soluble product formed (maltose) from the sphere of action. 
It appears necessary to have both the diastase and the yeast 
present together in a condition capable of exercising their 
respective functions for the increased action to occur. The 
action of acids on starch was also discussed by Dr. Morris, who 
showed that maltose is always obtained as a product of hydro- 
lysis together with dextrin and dextrose; this is in opposition 
of H. Johnson’s statement that the two latter compounds are 
the sole products of the action. But the most interesting con- 
tribution to this branch of chemistry was the joint discussion 
with Section K (botany) on symbiotic fermentation, on the 
occasion of the visit of the French Association. The discussion 
