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BOOKS AND CURRENT LITERATURE 



sporangium. After a period of rest of at least a month, germination, 

 not unlike that of the zoosporangia, may occur. An unusual process 

 of nuclear division, which the author considers as a peculiar type of 

 mitotic division, occurs in this plant. — Frederick A. Wolf. 



Anatomy of Dune Plants. — The Botanical Gazette publishes a 

 paper on the comparative anatomy of dune plants by Miss Starr of Mt. 

 Holyoke College.' After a brief historical sketch and an enumeration 

 of the most important ecological dune factors, the author describes 

 plants collected on the dunes at the southern end of Lake Michigan, 

 and compares the anatomy of stem and leaf with that of the same 

 species collected in the flood plains of the Mississippi and Desplaines 

 Rivers. The results obtained are tabulated. As was to be expected 

 leaves, bud scales, cork, etc., were found to be thicker in plants grooving 

 on the dunes than in the same species growing under mesophytic con- 

 ditions. Leaves varied greatly with the seasons, those collected in 1911 

 from species growing in mesophytic locations being thicker than those 

 collected in 1909 from the same species growing under xerophytic condi- 

 tions — a fact explained by the unusually high temperature, the abnormal 

 amount of sunshine and the small precipitation in the spring of 1911. 

 Wood vessels were more numerous and thicker-walled in dune plants, 

 and had a greater cross-sectional area than in the mesophytes — facts 

 that agree in the main with the work of Cannon on desert plants. The 

 paper, which is really a continuation of the work started by Cowles in 

 1899, is a valuable contribution to the ecology of the Lake Michigan 

 dunes. — J. G. Brown. 



' Starr, Anna M., Comparative Anatomy of Dune Plants. Bot. Gaz. 54 : 265- 

 305, figs. 35. October, 1912. 



