March 24, 1905.] 



bCIENCE. 



471 



as anything other than special relation be- 

 tween an organism and its environment. 

 Kealism and the relational view of conscious- 

 ness are strictly correlative. They are dif- 

 ferent aspects of the same truth, and can not 

 be defended or understood apart from one an- 

 other. 



Radical Empiricism and Wundt's Philosophy : 

 Charles H. Judd. 



Wundt's Critical Kealism is closely related 

 in its fundamental positions to James's recent 

 philosophical discussions. Reality and im- 

 mediate experience are made synonymous by 

 Wundt. The concept of consciousness is not 

 like the concept matter of the physical sci- 

 ences, but includes only the immediate proc- 

 esses of experience in their totality. On the 

 basis of these closely related fundamentals 

 Wundt develops the details of his system in 

 such a way as to emphasize the distinctions 

 between physical and psychical phenomena 

 while James strives to minimize these dis- 

 tinctions. R. S. WOODWORTH, 



Secretary. 



THE TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB. 



Minutes of a meeting held February 14, 

 1905, at the American Museum of Natural 

 History. 



The first paper, which was illustrated by 

 lantern slides, was by George H. ShuU and 

 was entitled ' Stages in the Development of 

 Sium cicuticefolium.' Dr. Shull presented 

 briefly the great range of leaf-form in this 

 species at different stages of growth, conclud- 

 ing that these various stages give no safe indi- 

 cation of ancestral forms. 



The life cycle of Sium fits it for the condi- 

 tions under which it grows at different stages 

 of its growth, it being mesophytic, hydrophytic 

 and xerophytic in turn. This cycle of 

 changes seems to be independent of external 

 conditions and proceeds regularly without re- 

 gard for the environment. The consideration 

 of a number of rejuvenated buds shows that 

 rejuvenescence may be brought about by sub- 

 merging senescent buds in water, and that the 

 later the stage of senescence the earlier will be 

 the juvenile forms which are induced to ap- 



pear. Evidences were presented tending to 

 prove that the proximal leaflets of pinnate 

 leaves are homologous in any series of leaves 

 taken from the same plant and that the other 

 leaflets are likewise homologous, counting 

 from the proximal pair. 



The paper was the subject of considerable 

 discussion. 



The second paper was by Tracy E. Hazen, 

 on ' Recent Advances in the Phylogeny of the 

 Green Alga>.' The subject was introduced by 

 a sketch of Borzi's group Confervales, now en- 

 larged into the class Heterokontae, comprising 

 genera showing natural affinities, taken from 

 the three old orders Protococcales, Confervales 

 and Siphoneae. This new class, accepted by 

 all recent investigators, serves to indicate the 

 artificiality of the traditional classification. 



The clearer lines of descent of the chief 

 groups of Chlorophyceas from the unicellular, 

 motile Chlamydomonas were traced; the first 

 tendency in the direction of aggregations of 

 motile cells finding its highest expression in 

 Volvox; the second tendency, in the direction of 

 septate cell division, to form non-motile bodies 

 of increasing solidarity, leading through the 

 Tctrasporaceai to the Ulvaceae, which have been 

 placed in a separate order, Ulvales, by some 

 recent authors, and finally, through such 

 forms as Stichococcus, to the typical fila- 

 mentous and branched forms culminating in 

 Coleochcete. The third or Endosphwrine 

 tendency from Chlamydomonas as suggested 

 by Blackman, was held by the speaker to 

 furnish an unsatisfactory origin for the Si- 

 phoneae, inasmuch as the endophytic forms 

 associated with Endosphwra may be regarded 

 as too specialized in their mode of life at least. 

 It is much more natural to derive the Si- 

 phoneae from the septate, multinucleate Clado- 

 phoraceae. The latter group may well be re- 

 garded as an intermediate order, easily derived 

 from the Ulotrichaceae through such forms as 

 Hormiscia (Urospora) and Rhizoclonium. 



The recent proposition of Bohlin and Black- 

 man to regard the fEdogoniaceae as forming a 

 class derived from a separate unicellular an- 

 cestor is at least premature, and it does not ap- 

 pear at all impossible that this group may 

 have been derived from a UlotJirix-Mke form 



