Minutes of Proceedings. 
amount of light upon their origin, as well as upon the processes of rock 
metamorphism in the earth's interior. Nearly all the specimens shown 
were peculiar to South Africa. 
Dr. J. K. L. Halm spoke on the application of Doppler's principle to 
astro-physical problems. The lecturer dwelt on the importance of this 
principle in determining the motions of the celestial bodies in the line of 
sight by means of the displacements of the lines of their spectra from their 
normal positions, and illustrated its application by such examples as binary 
stars, Saturn's rings, the rotation of the sun, and the motion of the earth 
in its orbit round the sun. 
Ordinaey Monthly Meeting. 
September 16, 1908. 
Mr. S. S. Hough, F.E.S., President, in the Chair. 
Dr. Marloth read a note on the pollination of Belmontia cordata. 
Belmont ia cordata is a small annual, with a bunch of bright yellow, 
star-shaped flowers, fairly numerous just now around Cape Town and in 
the Mats. The flowers possess several remarkable contrivances, and 
although the plant is so common, it had not been possible, up to the 
present, to understand their function, and to find any insect which 
could have carried the pollen from one flower to another. The flowers 
are scented, and possess small appendages at their anthers, called Brown's 
bodies. They contain a sugary fluid, and this, it has been ascertained 
now, attracts a tiny, small insect, hardly one-fifteenth of an inch long, 
belonging to the Thrips family. The flowers possess two kinds of stigmas 
for the reception of the pollen, a structure which is not known from any 
other plant. This secondary stigma secures pollination in case the 
terminal stigma should not have received some pollen in time. 
Miss E. L. Stevens read a paper on the Embryo- Sac of the Penae- 
acese, a small order confined to the south-west region of Cape Colony. 
The embryo- sac of this order, she said, differs from that of the typical 
Angiosperm in containing sixteen nuclei instead of eight (these sixteen 
nuclei being organised into four egg-apparatus), and a definitive nucleus 
formed by the fusion of four of the nuclei. The early stages in the 
development of the sac show none of the polarity considered to be so 
characteristic of the Angiosperm sac ; and the whole structure of the sac 
is confirmatory of Dr. Pearson's hypothesis regarding the origin of the 
Endosperm of Angiosperms. 
Professor H. H. W. Pearson read a note on " Endosperm." He said: 
Of the many characteristics which distinguish the living Gymnosperms 
