260 General Notes. [ April, 
wants and tastes; but in places where wasps are not very abun- 
dant the products of their selection are shared by other insects. 
10. As the most industrious and most skillful insects, and 
withal those most dependent upon flowers for food, bees have 
played the most n ganeor part in selecting flowers—at least in 
Germany. They have given us the most numerous, most diversi- 
fied and most specialty elaborated flowers, the visiting of whic 
calls into play those faculties which the bees have acquired and 
inherited through their labors in caring for their young. 
11. Finally, certain syrphus-flies, passionately fond of color, 
and themselves brightly colored, but not especially dependent 
upon flowers for food, have succeeded in producing certain flow- 
ers APS A to their tastes ; meantime natural selection has 
given rise to contrivances in these flowers which secure cross- prak 
Elizatfon iani the instrumentality of these insects.— Wm. 
lease. 
BotranicaL News.—In the ras and March numbers of 
the Botanical Gazette, Mr. A. H. Curtiss begins a series of papers 
on the Botany of the Shell Islands of Florida. Mr. A. P. Mor- 
gan writes in the February number on the the phyllotaxis of 
leaves. Mr. C. R. Barns indicates the differences between Helop- 
sis and Helianthus, and Mr. C. H. Peck describes eight new 
species of fungi. In the March number Mr. A. M. Canby con- 
tributes some interesting notes on Baptisia, with a synopsis of 
American species. 
Trimen's Journal of Botany for February contains an interest- 
ing biographical notice of Elias Fries, by A. N. Lundstrom, 
accompanied by a portrait. The ferns of Borneo are enumerated 
number of new species described by J. G. Baker. Jacob 
Bigelow, the author of the “ Plants of the Vicinity of Boston,” a 
book thumbed so much by botanical students twenty years ago,’ 
and which gave such a gentle and healthful stimulus to the walks 
of local botanists, died recently in Boston at an advanced age. 
Bigelow and other botanists owed much to the zeal and activity 
of Dr. J. W. Robbins, of Uxbridge, Mass., who died at about the 
same time. 
ZOOLOGY.* 
THE OVIPOSITION OF THE QUEEN BEE AND DZIERZON’S THEORY. 
—According to a classical theory which had its birth in Germany, 
and which no one now-a-days disputes, a fecundated egg of the 
queen bee is a female egg, and all unfecundated eggs are male. 
The mother bee, it is said, can even lay at will an egg of one or 
the other sex. This faculty, which is exceptional in the animal 
kingdom, is explained by assuming that the bee, at the moment 
of the passage of the egg into the oviduct, can apply to it or not 
{The departments of Ornithology and Mammalogy are conducted by Dr. ELLIOTT 
Coves, U. $. A. ; 
