Mat 29, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



857 



normal the total percentage of " unfit " runs 

 up to 10.1. 



It should be added that, on the whole, condi- 

 tions of life were not rigorous for this group. 

 Food was more than abundant, means of pro- 

 tection and concealment ready, and natural 

 enemies apparently not numerous, so that these 

 percentages may prove to be unusual. They 

 certainly seemed so to me and they are noted 

 here not only as bearing on the general sub- 

 ject of selection, but in the hope that others 

 may make known similar data. 



Wm. E. Kellicott 

 The Woman's Coixeqe of Baltimoee 



BOTANICAL NOTES 



FLOWERING PLANT NOTES 



"W. 0. Worsdell in the April, 1908, Journal 

 of Botany discusse3 " The Affinities of 

 Paeonia " and concludes that this genus is 

 more closely related to Magnoliaceae than to 

 Banunculaceae, but he suggests that it should 

 more properly be referred to a family 

 (" order " in the older sense) by itself which 

 he names Paeoniaceae. 



Dr. Ernst A. Besseys paper on " The 

 Florida Strangling Figs," from the forth- 

 coming nineteenth Annual Report of the 

 Missouri Botanical Garden, deals with two 

 native species of Ficus (F. aurea and F. 

 populnea), the first of which has the curious 

 habit of beginning its growth as an epiphyte 

 and later becoming terrestrial by sending down 

 nimierous slender roots which eventually 

 thicken and fuse together, finally wholly sur- 

 rounding and strangling the host. Some 

 striking photographs are reproduced in the 

 plates. The curious fact is brought out that 

 in F. aurea the seeds require light in order 

 to germinate, no doubt related to its epiphytic 

 habit. 



F. M. Bailey, colonial botanist, continues 

 his systematic " Contributions " in the 

 Queensland Agriculiwral Journal, the No- 

 vember (1907) number containing descriptions 

 of four new orchids from New Guinea, and 

 the February (1908) number one new grass, 

 ArundifMria cohoni from Queensland. 



Professor Doctor J. W. Harshburger has 

 published in the Proceedings of the American 

 Philosophical Society (Vol. 46, 1907) a sug- 

 gestive paper on " Tasonomic Charts of the 

 Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons." Two 

 charts are reproduced, one of the mono- 

 cotyledons, and the other of the dicotyledons, 

 in which each family is given a place in a 

 genetic tree. In the second chart the Gamo- 

 petalae are shown to be derived from two great 

 phyla, 



H. S. Hammond publishes a short account 

 (accompanied with a plate of many good 

 figures) of the embryology of Oxalis corni- 

 culata, in the February (1908) Ohio Nat- 

 uralist, in which he calls attention to " a 

 multicellular haustorium-like organ which is 

 formed from the basal cells of the suspensor," 

 and which burrows its way into the integu- 

 ments until it finally reaches the testa. 



Agnes Chase finds {Botanical Gazette for 

 February, 1908) that the grasses of the genus 

 Triplasis have fertile cleistogamous flowers 

 enclosed in the sheaths of the stems. In 

 Amphicarpon amphicarpon similar cleistogam- 

 ous flowers occur in the sheaths of the sub- 

 terranean stems. 



Recent numbers of the " Leaflets of Philip- 

 pine Botany " contain papers on " Freycinetia 

 from Lucban," and " Some New Leguminosae" 

 (by A. D. E. Elmer), " Some New and Crit- 

 ical Ferns" (by E. B. Copeland), and "A 

 Fascicle of Tayabas Figs" (by A. D. E. 

 Ehner). In the last paper forty-one species 

 are enumerated. 



In a sixty-six-page paper in the Annals of 

 Botany for April, 1908, Ethel Sargent dis- 

 cusses the " Reconstruction of a Race of 

 Primitive Angiosperms," this being an ab- 

 stract of a series of eight lectures delivered 

 in the University of London in May and 

 June, 1907. In it the author holds to the 

 monophyletie origin of the angiosperms, and 

 avows her " complete agreement with the gen- 

 eral conclusions " reached by Arber and Par- 

 kin in their " Origin of Angiosperms." These 

 general conclusions, it will be remembered, 

 are that the angiosperms were derived from 

 cycadean ancestors similar to Bennettites, and 



