162 Scientific Intelligence. 
the broken end of the crystal in a globular form, similar to cer- 
tain tourmalines described by Hamlin. 
On examining the crystals closely I found a few which had 
attached to them what seemed to be small quartz crystals. The 
angles, however, did not appear to agree with those of quartz, 
and knowing that phenacite was often mistaken for quartz, as its 
name suggests, I thought that they might be phenacites. Mr. 
W. Cross confirmed my supposition, and “he placed the crystals in 
the hands of Mr. Penfield of the Sheffield Scientific School, who 
has fully described them (see page 180 of this number). 
UII. Botany AND ZooLoey. 
1. Beobachtungen tiber den Blumenbesuch von Insecten und 
Frielandpflanzen des Botanischen Gartens zu Berlin. von Dr. E. 
Loew, Oberlehrer am K. Realgymnasium zu Berlin, 1885. Also 
Weitere Beobachtungen, etc., 1886.—These two papers, published 
one in the third, the other in the fourth volume of the Jahrbuch of 
the Berlin Botanic Gardens, together make a treatise of 180 
pages, intended to supplement and to extend the well-known 
investigations of the late Hermann Miiller upon the reciprocal 
relations of showy flowers and insects. Miiller investigated these 
relations in a natural flora, that-of Germany, in which these rela- 
tions were normally established. Dr. Loew studies them in an 
artificial assemblage of plants recently brought together in a 
large botanical garden. Miiller undertook, by counting the visi- 
tors to each kind of flower, to determine what kinds and species 
of insects were especially active in its fertilization, and how the 
insect had become adapted to the particular blossom, as well as 
the blossom to the insect, in the long process of natural selection. 
Dr. Loew’s object was to ascertain what selections each species 
or group of insects will make among the flowers of all the princi- 
pal natural orders brought together for cultivation in our own 
days from various parts of the world. To keep the inquiry 
within definite and manageable limits, it was restricted to. three 
geographical groups of plants: 1, those of the Kuropean and 
N. Asiatic forest zone; 2, those of the Mediterranean and the 
Orient; 3, N. American and E. Asiatic plants. 
Miller assumed that wherever the flower and its fertilizing 
insects harmonize perfectly in their adaptations, it must be that 
the visiting insects have remained the same since the blossom, 
under the influence of the fertilizers, acquired its special adapta- 
tions; and that, wherever the adjustment is incomplete a consid- 
erable change bas occurred; either the plant is an immigrant 
from some other locality, or ’ foreign insects have come into its 
locality, or its proper cross-fertilizers have disappeared. And 
the conclusions gathered from Miiller’s statistics were: 1. That the 
more exposed the nectar in a flower, the larger the proportion of 
insects with short proboscis visiting it, also, of the kinds; while in 
proportion as the nectar is removed from direct access, the pro- 
