1883.] Composite and Orchidee in the Natural System. 1245 
derstand him rightly) supplementary to that of sight. True it 
seems in many cases as though insects deprived of their antenne 
are somewhat blind; but in vastly more instances they do not 
seem so. Take, for example, almost any beetle one may pick up. 
Cut off the antenne and let them run, and we cannot get them 
to act in any way not as before. Whatever it be it is in a very 
different manner connected with the life of different insects. In 
many instances the deprivation of them seems almost fatal; in 
others again it is scarcely noticed. Cut them off from a sleeping 
roach and it will barely awake. Take your scissors and snip them 
from the gray “stinck bug” as it walks over your window sill or 
on your door step, and it will stop short where it is and sit still 
for hours in one place. All experiments of this kind are easily 
performed, and I hope that many who have even a very few mo- 
ments to spare, will pay some attention to this part of science, so 
late in being fully investigated. If so, one object, at least, of this 
paper will be accomplished. 
Oo 
ON THE POSITION OF THE COMPOSITZ AND 
ORCHIDE# IN THE NATURAL SYSTEM. 
BY JOSEPH F. JAMES. 
HE various authors who have, at different times, written on 
systematic botany, have had different schemes for a natural 
arrangement of the orders of plants. Some have placed one order , 
at the head of the system, some another. Hardly two seem to 
agree as to the ones which should follow in a natural sequence, 
The large majority of writers, if indeed not all, have considered 
the Polypetalous division of the Dicotyledons the most highly 
developed, and have placed the Gamopetal in the second, and 
the Apetalæ in the third class. Ever since the time of DeCan- 
dolle, in 181 3, down to Bentham and Hooker, our latest authori- 
ties, the Ranunculacez have generally been placed at the head of 
the flowering plants. It is the intention, in the present paper, to 
Show reasons why this should not be so, and to suggest another 
and very different arrangement of the orders. 
It would be well at the outset to remark that no system of bot- 
any is to be regarded as unmodifiable. All opinions, all ideas, are 
liable to change, and the fact cannot be better stated than was 
expressed by Lindley, in 1845, in the preface to his Vegetable 
