19^ Scientific Intelligence. 
out a miserable existence for a few days or weeks. U'his, how- 
ever, does not appear to be true ; for we find it stated in the 
Memoirs of the Society of Natural History of Wetterau, that 
a Mr Schaepf of Gottorf, reared a featherless canary-bird, which 
continued living and in good health for upwards of three ye^s. 
BOTANY. 
✓ 
S6. New Siliceous grass. — In the. hills between the Circars 
and the Nagpore country, a kind of jungle grass occurs in great 
abundance, in the joints of which a very perfect siliceous deposit 
is found. Dr Roxburgh makes no mention of it. This curious 
fact is contained in a letter from Dr Moore to Dr Kennedy of 
Edinburgh. 
37. Germination of the Musci. — Mr James Drummond, Su- 
perintendant of the Botanic Garden at Cork, has lately made 
some very curious and important observations on the germina- 
tion of mosses. He has succeeded in tracing the progress from 
the seed of nearly thirty species. The opinion of Linnaeus, 
that the capsules of mosses were only antherae filled with pollen, 
was properly rejected by Hedwig, but has been revived by 
Beauvois : the question may now be regarded as finally settled ; 
for in Mr Drummond’s experiments, the powder from the cap- 
sules never failed to germinate ; and he uniformly obtained the 
same species of moss from which the capsules had been taken. 
He tried the seeds, both in earth and in water. In the former 
case, he previously torrifled the earth, so as to exclude the pos- 
sibility of other minute seeds existing in it in a state fit for ve- 
getation : the earth having been thus rigorously purified, was 
put into garden-pots ; these, again, were covered closely with 
small bell-glasses, and moisture was communicated to the pots 
by placing them in water that had been boiled. In the other 
case, he sowed the seeds on the surface of rain-water, and kept 
the vessel carefully covered. In the water, the germination 
proceeded with great rapidity, being visible the second or third 
day, when examined with the compound microscope. Mr 
Drummond found, that the seeds of all the different kinds of 
mosses produced at first similar articulated filaments. These 
Hedwig regarded as cotyledons, and Sprengel as minute con- 
ferv-ae : they are, however, neither cotvledons nor confervse, but 
3 
