204 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, éde. 
under Sl acioad stimulus.” He. first cote his ae 
peratures, the effects produced by poisons and anesthetics, the 
responses are identical with those Ritherto “held to be characteristic 
of muscle and nerve and of the sensitive Danis He drew the con- 
clusion that the underlying phenomena of life are the same in both 
animals and plants, and that the siete on which he hee 
demonstrated are but the common physiological expression of thes 
r. O. Stapf read a paper on the fruits of Melocanna abba 
Trin., an endospermless viviparous genus of Gramineae. ey & 
of the shape and size of small apples or inverted pears, u usually 
terminating with a short and long beak; the longest measuring as 
much as five inches in length. They ¢ onsist of a hard, thick, 
strands in the axis of the embryo, and send innumerable 
branchlets near the surface of the ey fundamental 
tissue in which the strands are embedded is deticately-walled 
parenchyma, full of starch. There i Fi no endosperm, Germination 
starts while the fruits are still on se oon and the young shod 
may attain a length of as sma as inches, whilst a bundle of 
deposited in the cells of the parenchyma, but finally inducing also 
the partial solution of the cell-walls. This structure of the fruit of 
Melocanna is almost unique in grasses, and was not known before. 
It is probably repeated, although with some modifications, in the 
genera Melocalamus and Ochlandra. 
Ar the meeting of the same Society on April 8, Mr. R. Morton 
Middleton read translations of two unpublished letters from Lin- 
neus. The first, to Richard Warner, of Woodford, was written 
5 
letter to John Kilis. There ‘isa reference to it in ‘the wnt to 
to inneus, who was aed vie Ellis to toe the genus Warneria; 
