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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
position when the anthers are extrorse, or bent downwards, so as to render 
access of the pollen from them an improbable occurrence. All this may 
readily be seen by anyone who watches the operations of a humble-bee as 
he flies from flower to flower of any of our cultivated passion-flowers ; but 
it would seem probable, from the length of the gynophore, that in their 
native haunts the flowers of Tacsonias, for instance, are visited by some 
larger creatures than bees. Indeed, some travellers state that the honied 
flowers of the Tacsonias are very attractive to humming-birds ; and these 
elegant little creatures probably act as the carriers of pollen from one 
flower to another. 
A New British Coal Fossil was described to the Manchester Philosophical 
Society, January 9, 1872, by Mr. E. W. Binney, F.R.S. It resembles some- 
what the Psaronius Zeidleri found in the Upper Foot Coal Seam, near Old- 
ham. This species has been described by Corda, in his “ Beitrage zur 
Flora der Vorwelt,” and figured in Plate XI., but has not hitherto, Mr. 
Binney believes, been met with in the British coal-fields. The Oldham 
specimen appeared to him to be a petiole, of about one-eighth of an inch in 
diameter, and is of a nearly circular form in its transverse section, two- 
thirds of it consisting of a zone of strong parenchymatous tissue and an 
internal axis of vascular tissue arranged in four radiating arms of an irre- 
gular oval form, resembling a St. Peter’s cross. As he could not connect 
the specimen with a stem of Psaronius, he proposed to call it Stauropteris 
Oldhamia. In the above-named coal, as well as that of the Lower Brooks- 
bottom Seam, there is a great variety of beautiful petioles which have not 
yet been described. Some of them evidently belong to the genus Zygopteris , 
and may probably be discovered in connection with their stems, but most of 
them have been found detached, and sometimes mistaken for the rootlets of 
Stigmaria. From some specimens in his cabinet he is led to believe that 
Cotta’s Medullosa elegans is merely the rachis of a fern or a plant allied to 
one. 
The Plants of Oregon , America. — "We learn from Silliman’s “American 
Journal,” February 1872, that Mr. Elihu Hall, well known as an excellent 
and enterprising collector, during the past season made an extensive collec- 
tion of dried plants in Oregon, which are to be distributed in sets as soon 
as the materials can be put in order. The full sets will contain five or six 
hundred species, and Mr. Hall offers them to subscribers at eight dollars per 
hundred specimens. So far as the examination has gone, a good number of 
rare and interesting, and some wholly new species, are brought to light. 
Plants of this region being far from common in herbaria generally, it is 
thought that these sets will at once be taken up. As Mr. Hall is likely to 
be very soon engaged in another exploration, intending subscribers may 
address Mr. Charles Wright, Harvard University Herbarium, Cambridge, 
Mass. 
Structure of the Pistil in Primulacece. — In the “ Annales des Sciences ” 
of last year is a valuable paper on this subject by M. Van Tieghem. Modi- 
fying some of his formerly expressed views, he says that he now finds that 
the bundles in the placenta of Primula and other plants of the same order 
(as likewise in Caryophyllacece , &c.) present their liber-cells inward, their 
spiral vessels outward, contrary to the manner of vascular bundles of stems. 
