﻿BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, do 



Mr. Hugh Stannus has published in the Journal of the Society 

 of Arts for October and November an interesting course of lectures 

 on "Artificial Foliage in Architecture," which complements his 

 course on " Decorative Treatment of Natural Foliage," printed in 

 the same Journal for 1891. The lectures are well illustrated, and 

 we are glad to learn that they will probably be reissued in volume 



Prof. L. M. Underwood contributes an interesting paper to the 

 Bntiinicd Gazette for September on < The Evolution of the Hepatica?.' 

 The author protests against the folly of many botanical teachers 

 and text-books in making Marchantia polymorpha stand as a type of 

 the Hepatica, and thus leading the unsuspicious student to suppose 

 that Hepatics are all or mostly thalloid in character, instead of in- 

 cluding a relatively small percentage of thalloid species. Surely it 

 is to such false instructors as these that he refers when he says : 

 " There are some microscopic botanists whose degree of specialization 

 never permits them to look outside the limits of an apical cell." 

 Proceeding to his subject proper, he traces the development of the 

 principle of the alternation of generations from its simplest forms 

 in the Algae to the climax reached in the Pteridophytes ; and 

 reminds us that in the evolution of these latter "the line of descent 

 must be sought, not in a comparison of the highly developed asexual 

 phase of the one with the simple sporogone of the other [the Mus- 

 eineaa] , but along the line of the simpler sexual phase," where the 

 degree of development attained is comparatively small. He divides 

 the Hepatics into three groups, according to the three possible lines 

 of differentiation they have followed, viz. :— (1) "The development 

 of the thallus as such"; (2) " the transformation of the thallus into 

 a leafy axis " ; (3) the specialization of the sporogone at the expense 

 of the thallus." The three groups are, (1) the Mmr/iantialrs, for 

 which a suggestive p-di^iv.'-di^ram has been worked out on p. 355 ; 

 (2) the Juwjermanniales ; (3) the Anthocerotales, whose relationship 

 to the other Hepatics, to the Mosses, the Leptosporangiate Ferns, 

 and the higher plants is shown in a diagram on p. 360. Among 

 rmanniales are a number of thallose forms the majority of 

 which produce their fruit, not terminally, but laterally. These are 

 the •» Jungermanniaceas anakrogyna" of Leitgeb and Schiffner ; and 

 it is these anacrogynous genera that Prof. Underwood proposes to 

 separate off from the Jungermanniace® proper, which are acrogynous, 

 into a family bearing the new name Metzgeriacea. 



By the death of Nathanael Pringsheim on the 6th of October, 

 our Linnean Society, which elected him on May 3rd, 1866, loses 

 one of its oldest foreign members, and the science of plant- 

 physiology one of its most able exponents. Born in 1823 at 

 Wziesko, in Upper Silesia, Pringsheim began his student career 

 in the medical school of his native province, proceeding subse- 

 quently to Leipzig and Berlin. Medicine was soon rejected for 

 botany, and it was as a botanist that he took his degree of Doctor 



