THE 
NEW PHYTOIiOGIST. 
No. 8. 
October 27TH, 1904. 
THE CAMBRIDGE MEETING OF THE 
BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 
rpH E meetings of the Association that are held in the old 
University towns must always possess a certain distinction and 
charm which separate them from those that take place in business 
centres. In the case of Cambridge, also, the vivid scientific life of 
the University, and its admirable equipment for the pursuit of the 
various branches of science, add enormously to the pleasure and 
profit to be gained from such a meeting of scientific men. In no 
branch of science can this be more marked than in Botany. The 
Cambridge school is facile princeps in this country, while its 
magnificent, and at the same time thoroughly workmanlike Institute, 
an account of the opening of which will be found in this journal for 
March last, offers an ideal location for the meetings of Section K. 
With one or two exceptions every British botanist of note 
was present at the meeting, and the younger men, too, came in 
great force. There was also a record attendance of foreign guests, 
no less than twenty botanists from abroad, including many leaders 
of the science, coming to enjoy Cambridge hospitality. 
The President of the Section, Mr. Francis Darwin, than whom 
there could be no more appropriate occupant of the Chair, delivered 
his address on Thursday morning. His subject was “ The 
Perception of the Force of Gravity by Plants,” and the address 
was devoted to a detailed consideration of the evidence for and 
against the two current theories of the mechanism of “ gravi- 
perception ”—the radial pressure theory and the statolith theory. 
Though many of the phenomena involved are still obscure, and 
the whole subject is of considerable difficulty, Mr. Darwin concludes 
in favour of “ the general though not the universal applicability 
of the statolith theory.” The radial pressure mechanism suggested 
by Pfeffer and Czapek, may obtain, he thinks, in the Algae and 
Fungi, where statoliths have never been observed. There is no 
a priori reason why the mechanism of gravi-perception should 
not vary in different groups of plants. 
The rest of the morning was occupied by Dr. Scott’s account 
of an interesting new type of Sphenophyllaceous cone, and by 
Professor Bertrand’s account, illustrated by an immense series of 
lantern slides, of his and Professor Cornaille’s most recent and 
very beautiful researches on the leaf-traces of Ferns. British fern- 
anatomists were extremely glad to find Professor Bertrand among 
them, and his paper promises to clear up some of the most difficult 
problems in the morphology of the leaf-traces of the Filicinean 
phylum. 
