209 
the coming generation no way out of the dilemma save to reco g- 
nize the process as a perfectly natural, legitimate and inevitable 
one and to add to its equipment a knowledge of a ae which 
has already given much and promises to give still m his 
was perhaps the lesson which Benes itself most on he writer 
during the days when the Botanic Garden on the Neva cele- 
brated its bicentenary amid the acclamations of an assemblage 
as enthusiastic as it was eae of all that is connected 
with botany throughout the great Russian Empire. 
O. STAPF 
CONFERENCE NOTES 
The No vember conference of the Scientific Staff and Regis- 
tered Students of t ew York Botanical Garden was held in 
the laboratory of = museum building on the afternoon of 
November 5, at which the following reports of investigations 
were presented : 
“Summary of two years’ study of bud-variation in Coleus,” 
by Dr. A. B. Sto 
The studies on can variation in a variety of Coleus Blumei, 
ae and briefly aaa at the conference i in October, 1912, 
have been continued during thei g year. At the present 
time 482 plants have been grown in series of pedigreed cuttings 
all derived from two plants which had at first leaves with a color 
pattern of green, red and yellow. In this type the red is chiefly 
in blotches in the epidermis, the green is in the central part of 
the leaf and the yellow forms an irregular band about the green. 
Bud-variations have given at the present time ten quite dis- 
tinct color patterns involving loss of one or even two of the three 
color elements, the increase of the red to a solid epidermal cover- 
ing, and the reversal of the relative positions of the green and 
the yellow. Marked variations in the shape of the leaves have 
also appeared. Two cases of change in the phyllotaxy have 
arisen both having six ranks of leaves arranged in whorls o 
three. 
The variations in color are complete for single branches, for a 
