114 NATURE AND LIFE. 
quantity is smaller, and they are separate. Now, it has 
lately been discovered that in the latter case, under the 
influence of light, the green corpuscles we speak of undergo 
_ very singular changes of position. Some twelve years ago, 
Boehm noticed for the first time that in certain unctuous 
plants the grains of chlorophyll gather at one point of the 
wall of the cells under the action of the sun. He remarked 
that the phenomenon does not take place in the dark, nor 
in the red rays. The flat sheet made up of a single layer 
of cells, without epidermis, which composes the leaves of 
mosses, seemed to Famintzin the most suitable for this 
delicate kind of observations. He followed the movements, 
that take place in these sheets, by microscopic study. 
During the day the green coloring-grains are scattered 
about the upper and lower parts of the leaf-cells. At 
night, on the contrary, they accumulate toward the lat- 
eral walls. The blue rays affect them like white light; 
the yellow and the red ones keep the chlorophyll in the 
position it takes at night. The order of activity in the rays 
seems, then, to differ in this case from that in the phe- 
nomena of respiration. The researches of Borodine, Pril- 
lieux, and Roze, proved that these movements of coloring- 
corpuscles within the cells occur in almost all eryptoga- 
mous plants, and in a certain number of phanerogamous 
ones. The lately-published experiments of Roze show 
that in mosses the grains of chlorophyll are connected by 
very slender threads of plasma, and may suggest the idea 
that these threads are the cause of the changes of position 
just described. Perhaps there is some real relation be- 
tween them; but it must not be forgotten that these 
movements of the plasmatic matter inside the cell take 
place by day and night, and that light has no marked effect 
onthem. The green particles, on the contrary, creep over 
the walls of the cell, and move toward the lightest part as 
zoospores and some infusoria do. 
