308 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
BOTANY AND VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY. 
Dispersion of Seeds by the Wind. — A good paper on this subject has been 
contributed by M. A. Kerner, Director of the Botanic Garden of Innsbruck, 
to the “Zeit. des Deutsch. Alpen-vereins.” He made a thorough inquiry 
into the flora of the glacier moraines, and the seeds found on the surface of 
the glaciers themselves, believing that these must indicate accurately the 
species whose seeds are dispersed by the agency of the wind. Of the former 
description he was able to identify, on five different moraines, 124 species of 
plants j and a careful examination of the substances gathered from the sur- 
face of the glacier showed seeds belonging to thirty-six species which could 
be recognised with certainty. The two lists agreed entirely in general 
character, and to a considerable extent, also specifically ; belonging, with 
scarcely an exception, to plants found on the declivities and in the mountain 
valleys in the immediate vicinity of the glacier ; scarcely in a single in- 
stance even to inhabitants of the more southern Alps. M. Kerner’s conclu- 
sion is, that the distance to which seeds can be carried by the wind, even 
when provided with special apparatus for floating in the air, has generally 
been greatly over-estimated ; and this is very much in accordance with the 
view advanced by Mr. Bentham in his anniversary address to the Linnaean 
Society of London in 1869. Along with the seeds M. Kerner found, on the 
surface of the glacier, more or less perfect remains of a number of insects 
belonging to the orders Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera , Diptera and Coleoptera y 
which, like the seeds, belonged almost exclusively to species abounding in 
the immediate neighbourhood of the glaciers. 
The Fertilization of Conferee has been very carefully studied lately by 
Signor Delpino, who is now Professor in the State Forest School at Val- 
lombrosa. He has been paying much attention to dichogamous flowers, and 
to the difference between those fertilised by the wind (anemophilous), or by 
insects (entomophilous), or by animals of whatever sort — zodiophilous, as 
he terms them. Conferee , as is well known, are anemophilous, that is, their 
fecundation is entrusted to the wind ; their light and most abundant pollen 
is correlated to this, and the structure of the fertile inflorescence is such 
that the pollen reaches the very orifice of the ovule. In yew and cypress, 
and in other, if not all other genera of the sub-orders they represent, Delpino 
finds that, at the time when the ovule is ready for fecundation, a minute 
clear drop of liquid appears at the orifice of the ovule ; grains of pollen 
falling upon this are retained, are incited by it to develop the pollen-tube 
into the liquid first, thence into the ovule, and the drop is then re-absorbed 
or dries up. Alph. de Candolle, in a recent number of the “ Arch, des 
Sciences de la Bibl. universelle,” calls attention to the fact that this droplet 
was known, as to its appearance, function, and re-absorption, to his lato 
venerable townsman, Vaucher, and is described in his “Physiology of the 
Plants of Europe,” published in 1841. 
Action of Foreign Pollen on the Fruit of the Fertilised Plant. — “ Silliman’s- 
American Journal,” May, states that Maximowicz has collected in a Russian 
journal the observations and experiments on this subject, and recorded some 
observations of his own. He mutually crossed Lillium davuricum and L. 
bulbferum. Now, these have been taken for one and the same by late 
