BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, ETC. 71 



At the meeting of the Linnean Society on Dec. 21, the Presi- 

 dent, Dr. D. H. Scott, referred to the loss sustained by the Society 

 in the death of Sir Joseph Hooker, beyond doubt their most dis- 

 tinguished Fellow. He was elected June 7, 1842, over sixty-nine 

 years ago, and served on the Council, with only short intermissions, 

 from 1846 to 1884 ; he was Vice-President during a great part of 

 that time, and exercised a great influence on the affairs of the 

 Society. Much of his best work, so far as it was not in book- 

 form, was published by the Society — his memoirs on the Flora of 

 the Galapagos Islands, the distribution of Arctic plants, and the 

 classic memoir on Welwitschia mirahilis. The Society hoped to 

 have the honour of publishing his latest work, on the genus 

 Lnpatiens, on which he was actively engaged during the last 

 years of his life. The following Eesolution was then moved from 

 the chair: — "The Fellows of the Linnean Society of London, in 

 General Meeting assembled, desire to place upon record their 

 profound sense of the loss to the Society and to the world of 

 science, occasioned by the death of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker on 

 the 10th December, and their pride in his having been a Fellow 

 of the Linnean Society for nearly seventy years, during which, by 

 his scientific contributions to the Society's publications and his 

 advice throughout his many years of service on the Council, he 

 greatly added to the prestige and efficiency of the Society." The 

 Eesolution was carried unanimously, the Fellows rising in their 

 places. 



The Proceedings of the Linnean Society for 1910-11 contains 

 among other interesting matter Mr. Gepp's report of the results 

 of deliberations of the Brussels Congress as to the nomenclature 

 of algae, mosses, hepatics, and ferns and a history by the General 

 Secretary, Dr. B. Day don Jackson, of the portrait of Linnaeus by 

 Alexander Roslin (of which a reproduction is given), with remarks 

 on the "Lapland drum" represented in Hoffmann's frontispiece 

 to the Flora Lapponica ; Dr. Scott's presidential address and the 

 usual obituary notices are also included. 



The work of Eugenio Rignano, now translated by Mr. Basil 

 C. Harvey under the title Upon the Inheritance of Acquired 

 Characters {Chica^go: Open Court Publishing Co., 1911, price 3 dols.), 

 appeared for the first time in French in 1906, and attracted some 

 attention as the work of an engineer — very conversant with the 

 literature of the subject with which he was dealing — rather than 

 a professed biologist. The writer commences by the somewhat 

 remarkable statement that Haeckel's fundamental biogenetic law 

 that ontogeny is a recapitulation of phylogeny is " now perhaps 

 irrefutably " established, a dictum with which probably few 

 biologists would find themselves in agreement ; indeed, one of the 

 most recent writers on the subject. Professor Kellogg, goes so far 

 as to say that "the recapitulation theory is mostly wrong; and 

 what is right in it is mostly so covered up by the wrong part that 

 few biologists longer have any confidence in discovering the right." 

 The author's theory — his centro-epigenetic hypothesis — is that the 



