474 STRUCTURE OF THE FRUIT AND SEED OF RIBES. 
herbarium might be taken for a distinct species, but, studied on its native hills in thousands of 
specimens, clearly proves to be nothing but a depauperate or abortive state and not even a clearly 
defined variety. 
During a late excursion to our commons in company with Dr. Hilgard, he ascertained that on 
the northern slopes of hills and sinkholes, and near the edge of ponds, the plant had the ordinary 
appearance, but on the sunny and dry or even arid southern slopes not a single one among the thou- 
sands of specimens could be found the flowers of which were not quite inconspicuous; in inter- 
mediate situations the size and organization of the flowers were also intermediate. 
These incomplete flowers are smaller in all their parts than the regular ones; the sepals are 
erect and rather persistent; the petals always shorter than the sepals, but variable in size, shape, 
and number, or even entirely absent; the stamens always abortive and often reduced in number; 
the ovary shorter but fertile. 
The petals (ordinarily broadly obovate-spatulate, retuse, over 1 line long) are here linear-spatulate, 
entire, emarginate or bilobed, 4-4 line long, 2 or 4 in a flower, often of unequal size in the same 
flower, or entirely absent. The slender filaments bear a bilobed cellular head, often not more than 
0.05 line long, representing the anther, but without any regular structure. He found in single 
flowers 4, and often 5 or 6 of them, without petals, or associated with 2 or 4 rudimentary 
petals. It appears that in some incomplete tetrandrous flowers the pairs of stamens adhere to [155] 
the base of the corresponding exterior, and the pairs of petals to that of the interior sepals ; 
the 8 organs forming rather one than two cycles. 
How these female plants, as they must be called, which, this spring at least, form the im- 
measurably largest part of the whole crop, can be fertilized by the few complete ones growing in the 
neighborhood, is not easy to understand. 
Does not this dimorphism obtain in other species of this genus, in Lepedium and other Crucifere, 
and would not several so-called species fall, if correctly understood, under other fully developed ones 
as incomplete forms ?— Journal of Proceedings, April 15, 1861. 
Ill. STRUCTURE OF THE FRUIT AND SEED OF RIBES. 
FroM THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE ACADEMY OF ScIENCE OF Sr. Lovurs, Vou. II. 1862. 
Dr. ENGELMANN exhibited several drawings illustrating the structure of the fruit and seed [180] 
of the genus /ibes. His investigation of what constituted the pulp of the Cactus fruit (see 
p. 166) had induced him to examine the juicy fruits of allied families. It seemed strange that the 
structure of the gooseberries and currants, so common everywhere, had not, as far as he could 
ascertain, attracted the attention of vegetable anatomists. The only allusion he found to it was 
in Schleiden’s Grundziige (ed. 3, p. 408), where it is said that the pulp of the berry of Ribes 
seemed to be formed by the dissolution of the cells which originally constituted the testa itself. 
Dr. Engelmann found this pulp to consist of the arillus and of the modified epidermis of the testa. 
The arillus of Ribes is a fleshy or juicy dilatation of the funiculus; in the currants, at least in. 
R. rubrum, it is very short, cup-shaped, lobed, often obcordate, and embraces the base of the seed ; 
in the gooseberries (R. Grossularia and R. hirtellum were examined) it is much larger, as high 
and sometimes as large as the seed itself, entire, and attached to the funiculus, all along the [181] 
thaphe.. The substance of this arillus is rather firm, and consists of very small cells, in the 
common gooseberry between 0.01 and 0.05 line in diameter. The arilli of different seeds are apt 
to coalesce. 
