I9I5- 



Notes. 



terresiris, and having no other means of marking, removed the scape of 

 her left antenna. Ten minutes afterwards she was back again upon one of 

 the white flowers (she had been taken on a blue flower) and for eight or 

 nine minutes she kept passing from one white flower to another, resting 

 now and again on a blue blossom, but not taking honey from it. Worker 

 bees of B. agrorum and terresiris occasionally passed from blue to white, 

 or white to blue, but hardly ever collected from the flowers to which they 

 changed. In two cases, however, where I watched them closely, I found 

 workers of terresiris collecting from blue and white indiscriminately, or 

 rather gathering generally from one colour and occasionally from the other. 



I am not in a position to theorise as to what bearing these selective 

 preferences may have upon the question of cross -pollination. Fertile 

 seed -bearing, as we know, is impossible, or nearly so, for many plants, 

 without the intervention of bees, or other pollen -transferring insects ; 

 but exactly how far insect preferences, granting they are well-established, 

 may be held to limit cross -fertilization is quite doubtful. I have grown 

 beds of red and yellow Wallflowers, from seed, each bed being self-coloured 

 and remote from the different colour ; but from seed saved from each 

 flower-bed I have had plants with striped flowers, red and yellow. I 

 cannot prove that the bees were responsible for this, or that it would not 

 have occurred if the plants had been grown under glass, out of the reach 

 of bees. The white form of Scabiosa succisa is a sport, for the most part 

 a local sport, the type colour of the plant being purple -blue. No inter- 

 change of preferences by bees would be likely to affect it by cross- 

 pollination, though it may be argued that these instincts would aflect 

 that purpose in the case of other flowers. My conclusion, however, is 

 that we have yet to be sure of the bearing of the natural law in this, if 

 there be such a law, and how it is modified by circumstances. 



H. G. CUTHBERT. 



Dublin. 



Floating Barnacles on the Coast of Antrim. 



W^hile walking on the sandy shore near Portrush on the afternoon of 

 August 29th last, my attention was drawn to numerous whitish, globular, 

 spongy masses, varying in size from a marble to a tennis ball that had been 

 left on the shore by the receding tide. An examination of these masses 

 showed that imbedded in them were the ends of peduncles of the barnacle 

 Lepas fascicularis ; the larger masses having about a dozen barnacles 

 attached to them. These spongy ball-shaped masses, although they had 

 much the appearance of Algae or other foreign organisms to which the 

 barnacles had attached themselves, are formed by the barnacles, and consist 

 of a vesicular mass of secretion produced by certain glands (cement- 

 glands) situated in the peduncle of the barnacle. They had generally 

 grown round a piece of seaweed {Fucus vesiculosus chiefly) and serve to 

 give additional buoyancy to this species of barnacle, that is usually found 

 floating near the surface of the sea. 



Darwin {Monograph of the Cirripedia, Ray Society y 1851) gives a 

 detailed description of their structure, and mentions a curious account by 



