37 
BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, ée. 
Art the meeting of the Linnean Society on November 17th Lord 
Avebury gave a summary, illustrated i lantern- slides, of a paper 
“On the Shape of the Stems of Plan He pointed out that 
material. In a tree-stem it was nec — to resist strain coming 
from all directions, mon the woody tissues acted as a cireular series 
of girders. In herbs with opposite rane the strains were main] 
the quadrangular stem. Taking our native flora, he showed that 
gonal stems m aan be accounted for in a similar way, and inci- 
entally this threw light on the petals of so many flowers. Thus 
we find i in plants principles of construction which have gradually 
been worked out by the skill and science of our architects and 
engineers. 
Tt the meeting of the Linnean Society on December 15th the 
ieee ladies who had been proposed for election as Fellows were, 
with one exception, elected. The Society is to be congratulated on 
the forward step it has taken ; many of the new Fellows will be an 
acquisition to its ranks, and are eminently worthy of the honour 
conferred upon them This honour i is, however, we think, am: 
lessened by the addition of some whose only claim to admissio 
to a learned society is the fact of their relationship to existing 
Fellows. It is greatly to be regretted that the Linnean Society 
not some standard of admission —e exacting than that of being 
“attached to the study” of some branch of natural science; in 
the cases to which we have Seared the ‘‘ attachment” would seem 
to be of the slightest. The botanists of the Society will weleome 
to their ranks Miss Margaret Benson, Miss Gulielma Lister, —_ 
Ethel Sargant, and Miss Annie Lorrain Smith. 
We regret to learn that Sir Joseph Hooker has been cérhypelied 
by advancing age to retire from the editorship of the Botanical 
Magazine, which he has carried on cuintorraptelly for forty years. 
In the volumes for 1903 and 1904 Mr. Hemsley’s name appears as 
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