— Botany and Zoology. ; 945 
district for his Flora Boreali-Americana. In that work he is 
commemorated by a peculiar genus of Hricacew, which, however, 
had been previously named by Bongard upon specimens from 
Alaska. Consequently the name of Zolmiea was applied in 
Torrey and Gray’s Flora to a peculiar saxifragaceous plant of 
that coast. In his later years Dr. Tolmie devoted himself very 
much to the ethnology and linguistics of the Indian tribes with 
which he had so long been intimate. His name should have 
appeared in the botanical necrology of the year 1886. A. G. 
Professor Delpino, who as early as in the year 18738 announced 
the idea that most extra-floral nectar-glands in plants are useful 
to the plants that bear them, by attracting a body-guard of ants, 
has now published the first part of an elaborate memoir on the 
topic. His Prodromo d’una Monografia delle Piante Formicarie, 
taking up the orders seriatim, although in this first part it includes 
only the Polypetalous and a few of the earlier Gamopetalous 
orders, fills 111 pages, 4to, in the Memoirs of the Royal Academy 
of Sciences of Bologna, ser. 4, tome vii, 1886. The number of 
species recorded as having extra-nuptial glands is much larger 
than would have been expected. This term ‘extra-nuptial’ is 
coined to distinguish the glands under consideration from certain 
extra-floral glands which, no less than those in the flower, are sub- 
servient to pollination. The funzione myrmecofila performed by 
the ants so attracted and fed is the keeping off of caterpillars 
and other insects which prey upon the foliage, young fruits, ete. 
Fruit-growers and tree-planters, thankful though they be for 
these small favors, must wish that this function were still more 
extensive and effectual. A. G. 
The February number of the Botanical Magazine gives a figure 
of the new Compass Plant, Silphium albiflorum, Gray, a very 
recently published species, from Texas, raised in England from 
seed sent by one of its discoverers, Mr. Reverchon, whose name 
in the Botanical Magazine unfortunately appears as a place instead 
of a person. 
Alphonse de Candolle has a short article in the Archives des 
Sciences of January 15, on the botanical origin of some cultivated 
plants. It treatsmainly of Vicia Narbonnensis and Vicia Faba, 
and goes against the idea of Bentham that the latter (the proper 
bean of Europe) is a cultivated derivative of the former. It is 
also maintained that wheat should be regarded as a species 
distinct from Triticum Spelta and 7. monoccoccum, notwithstand- 
ing that some recent experiments have been successful in inter- 
crossing them. Horse Bean ( Vicia Haba), Chick-pea, Lentils, 
Wheat, and Maize,—species of which the botanical originals 
appear to be extinct,—all agree in having large farinaceous seeds, 
therefore, peculiarly subject to be eaten up by animals, such as 
mice, ete. ‘lo such depredations, M. de Candolle suspects that 
the unguarded native types of those species may have succumbed. 
2. Bibliotheca Zoologica II. Verzeichniss der Schriften iiber 
Zoologie welche in den periodischen Werken. enthalten und vom 
