PROCEEDINGS OF THE CLUB 



Minutes for the Meeting of May 15, 1940 



The meeting of the Torrey Botanical Club held at the New 

 York Botanical Garden on May 15, 1940, was called to order by 

 the President, Dr. B. O. Dodge, at 3 :30 P.M. 



Twenty-five persons were present. 



The minutes of the meeting of May 7 were adopted as read. 



Mrs. Mary E. Slavin, Doubleday Doran & Co., 14 West 49th 

 St., New York City, and Mr. Paul Frese, 70 East 45th St., New 

 York City, were elected to annual membership. 



Mr. Devereux Robinson, Hudson View Apartments, 183rd St. 

 and Pinehurst Ave., New York City, was elected to associate 

 membership. 



The resignations of Prof. T. C. Frye, Department of Botany, 

 University of Washington, Seattle, Wash., and Miss Elizabeth T. 

 Ojerholm, 807 East 14th St., Austin, Tex., were reported with 

 regret. 



The scientific lecture of the afternoon was presented by Dr. E. B. 

 Matzke of Columbia University. The speaker's abstract follows : 



In 1682 Grew likened cells to the "froth of beer or eggs," and since that 

 time there have been frequent comparisons between the shape of cells in tissues 

 and that of bubbles in foam. Throughout the nineteenth century, from Mirbel 

 in 1802 through Gray in 1887, cells were thought of commonly as twelve- 

 sided, like compressed spheres in "cannonball stacking," though Bernhardi 

 and Duchartre considered them fourteen-sided. Carrying in mind the investi- 

 gations and deductions of Plateau on soap films, of Kelvin on the division of 

 space, and of Thompson on the form of cells, Lewis studied carefully the 

 three-dimensional shape of 250 cells in undifferentiated tissues — pith, fat 

 tissue, and precartilage — and found that they had an average of 13.97 faces. 

 He concluded that such cells have an average of fourteen faces and that they 

 approximate the fourteen-sided figure of Lord Kelvin, of which eight sides 

 are hexagonal and six are square. More recently Marvin has very carefully 

 studied and modeled 100 Eupatorium pith cells, which have an average of 

 13.37 faces and are roughly divisible into two groups, the larger with slightly 

 more than fourteen sides, the smaller with slightly fewer. 



Analyzing the shapes by compressing lead shot, Marvin found that such 

 shot, of uniform size, varied in number of faces from 8.41 to 14.16, depending 

 on the extent to which "intercellular" spaces were eliminated, while the 

 peripheral shot had 10.75 sides as an average. Other investigations disclosed 

 that when small shot are mixed with large and compressed, the small shot 

 have fewer than fourteen contacts, the large more than fourteen. 



More recently, investigations have been made on the three-dimensional 

 shape of bubbles in foam, using a technique by which the volume of each 



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