GENERAL NOTES. 



An Active Desmid. — I have been much interested lately in 

 observing a species of desmid, Cosmarium botrytis. When in 

 bright sunlight it has a slow rotary movement, turning success 

 sively from right to left and from left to right, with now and then 

 (if my eyes did not deceive me) what might be called a spasmodic 

 jerk. The play of the protoplasm within the plant-body is ex- 

 ceeding rapid, resembling, in the words of some writers, "the 

 swarming of bees." There seems to be three centers of move- 

 ments among the granules in each half of the desmid, but as to 

 this I am not quite positive. 



I have never seen the revolving motion of the plant excepting 

 when in the full glare of the sun, even when it gave evidence 

 of being alive by the movement of its protoplasm. I call atten- 

 tion to this because in the few books of reference accessible to 

 me, I find no mention of a revolving desmid.— Boise Butler, Mm- 

 11 apolis, Minn. 



The Coffee-leaf Fungus one of the Uredine/E.— In an in- 

 teresting paper in the January number of the Quarterly jow'f 

 of Microscopical Science, H. M. Ward describes and figures all the 

 known stages of the coffee-leaf fungus ( Uemilcia vastainx) o\ 

 Ceylon, and demonstrates its affinities with the ordinary Uredin- 

 e.x\ I'uccinia. Uromyces, Melampsora, etc. When Berkeley de- 

 scribed it in 1869, he considered it to be " with difficulty referable 

 to any recognized section of fungi," and regarded it as interme- 

 diate between the old group Mucidines and the Uredine.e. Ab- 

 bay and Morris subsequently came to the conclusion that the 

 bodies considered to be spores by Berkeley, were sporangia, tft 

 entirely unsettling for a time all previous notions as to the rela- 

 tionship of the parasite. ., 1 



The gross anatomy of the coffee-leaf fungus is thus describee 

 by Dyer {Qr. your. Mic. Set, April, 1880) : " To the naked eye 

 » Edited by Prof. C. E. Bessey, Ames, Iowa. 



