268 Notes * 
and occasional suppression of C' adds great force to the argument 
that they are really staminodes. 
There is some difficulty, however, in supposing that the staminodes 
represent stamens accidentally confluent with the pistil ; Fig. 4 shows 
(more enlarged) the manner in which the white base of the rudi- 
mentary filaments sits upon the shoulder of the nut, as if a trichome. 
There are no proper stamens attached to the two nuts figured, but 
in nuts so ripe they might have fallen. 
C. B. CLARKE, Kew. 
OFT MACROSPORIUM PARASITICUM.— In the spring of 
1887, at the request of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, I went 
to the Bermuda Islands for the purpose of studying a disease at that 
time very prevalent among the onion-plantations of that colony, I 
had been informed that the trouble was caused by the attack of an 
injurious insect, and consequently I was, on my arrival in Bermuda, 
rather disconcerted to find that the disease was obviously due to a 
parasitic fungus. Owing to the difficulty of communication with the 
mainland, and the scarcity of scientific works in the hands of the 
American booksellers, I was unable to procure any literature on the 
subject of parasitic fungi, and so was thrown entirely on my own 
resources to work out the life-history of the fungus causing the disease 
amongst the onions. At the very beginning of my investigation I 
found that the disease had two stages : the first, which the planters 
called the white mildew, was caused by the Peronospora Schleideniana , 
and was described by me in the Kew Bulletin, No. 10. The second 
stage is caused by Macrosporium parasiticum , and it appears in 
Bermuda only upon those plants which are dead or dying, having 
been killed by the Peronospora. 
I made a number of very careful drawings of all the stages of the 
life-history of the Macrosporium which I could procure, in the very 
primitive laboratory I established at Hamilton. I was, however, 
unable to work out the development or the structure of the perithecium, 
and therefore I have never published these. The publication of the 
able paper ‘ On the life-history of Macrosporium parasiticum ’ by 
Mr. Kingo Miyabe 1 , however, cleared up these points, and in this 
note I propose only to point out a few details in which his observations 
1 Annals of Botany, No. IX, 1889. 
