112 General Notes. [February, — 
matter is more readily absorbed by the leaves than by the roots, over- 
feeding killing the plant sooner through the leaves than through the 
roots alone, although the roots also certainly absorb nitrogenous matter. 
Dr. Tait had announced, independently of Mr. Darwin, the separation of 
a substance closely resembling pepsin from the viscid secretion of the 
glands of Drosera dichotoma. 
In the September number of the (London) Journal of Botany, Mr. 
J. W. Clark details another important independent series of experiments 
with a similar result. He obtained Jarge quantities of plants of Drosera 
rotundifolia, and a smaller quantity of Pinguicula lusitanica, and fed 
the leaves with the bodies of freshly-killed flies soaked in a solution of 
citrate of lithium. The needful precautions being taken to prevent the 
solution from being carried mechanically to other parts of the plant, 
after an interval of forty-five or fifty hours various portions of the plant 
were incinerated, and the ashes tested for lithium by the spectroscope. 
The result proved conclusively that the products of digestion, after 
absorption by the leaves, do enter the leaf-stalk, and are thence dis- 
tributed to other parts of the plant. — A. W. BENNETT. 
Tae Lire-History or Moutps.— A most important contribution to 
our knowledge of the lower forms of life is contained in Dr. Oscar Brefeld’s 
Botanische Untersuchungen über Schimmelpilze (translated by Dr. W. 
R. McNab in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science for Octo- 
ber), containing an account of a series of very close observations on the 
life-history of Penicillium glaucum and others of the commonest moulds 
belonging to the same genus. Besides the well-known non-sexual mode 
of reproduction by conidia, Dr. Brefeld detected also on the mycelium 
bodies which he terms “sclerotia,” the products of a sexual process. 
These contain the germ of a second generation produced from the fer- 
tilized carpogonium. There are therefore in Penicillium two stages or 
alternations of generations. The first or sexual generation is large, and 
capable of producing non-sexual spores. The second or non-sexual gen- 
eration is small, and lives as a parasite on the nutrient tissue which sur- 
rounds it in the form of a sclerotium or sporocarp, which after a time 
develops asci and ascospores, these latter again producing the first 
sexual generation. This formation of ascospores seems to show that 
Penicillium must be placed in the group of Ascomycetes; and Brefeld 
considers that, from the striking resemblance of the minute structure of 
the sclerotia of Penicillium to that of the common truffle, this genus of 
moulds must be placed close to the Tuberacew. — A. W. BENNETT. 
FUNGI HEAPED UP IN PINES BY SQUIRRELS. — Mr. J. S. Fa 
sent us specimens of a fungus which he finds heaped up in considerable 
buantities in the crotches of young pine-trees not more than ten or 
twelve feet high, at Wood’s Hole, Mass. - Mr. Fay at first supposed that 
these heaps were accidental, but is now convinced that they were made 
either by squirrels or blue jays. ‘The fungi are Boleti, and, as far as can 
