38 
MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES. 
On the Structure of Victoria regia. By George Lawson, F.R.P.S., 
F.B.S. From Proceedings of the Botanical Society for November, 1855. 
If the sums which have been expended on Victoria houses, if the 
sumptuous illustrations of Hooker and Fitch, are justified by the gorgeous 
amplitude of the regal water-lily, its claims to attention in a scientific 
view also have not been neglected. Of the peculiar structure which marks 
the allied families of the Nymphteaceae and Neiumbiacese (dicotyledones 
with monocotyledonous structure), it presents not only a most conspicuous, 
but, in some points, a singular example. Deficient vascularity, in the stems 
of the Victoria, issues in absolute privation; and the fluids permeate the 
cellular tissue without the assistance of closed vessels. After all that 
Lindley, Hooker, Planchon, Loescher, Henfrey, and Trecul have contributed 
to the history of its organization, Mr. Lawson has found some points still 
requiring further elucidation. One material subject of his remarks is the 
nature of the numerous minute perforations found in the mature leaf of the 
Victoria apart from the stomata, which last are placed in the upper surface 
of the leaf as in other Nymphaeaceae. Planchon has applied to these pores 
the name of stomatodes , and imagines that they serve for the escape of gas 
generated by the water in the spaces between the ribs which bear up the 
leaf. Trecul, without denying this function to them, has described a pe¬ 
culiar formation and disruption of cells in the interior of the leaf, which 
precedes the opening of these pores. Mr. Lawson, indeed, thinks that 
they present merely an incipient condition of that partial development of 
parenchyma observable in many water plants, and of which Ovirandra fenes- 
tralis offers such a striking instance, the leaf being there reduced to a mere 
skeleton. Trecufs observations, however, might lead us to inquire whether 
the development of these apertures, in the leaf originally continuous, is 
properly analogous to reduction of tissue in the sense in which Mr. Lawson 
uses the phrase. 
KBateUroras ffottos. 
February 4th, 1856, died, at a very advanced age, Dr. Frederick Klug, Direc¬ 
tor of the Royal Museum, Berlin, one of the eminent Entomologists who have 
illustrated that establishment in a sort of scientific descent. The most eminent 
perhaps of these, the late Professor Eriehson, was son-in-law to Klug, one of whose 
latest literary labours was a biographical memoir of Eriehson, inserted in the Stettin 
Entomological Journal of 1850. Klug’s scientific publications are numerous and 
well known. The stores of the unrivalled insect collection of the Berlin Museum, 
under his direction, were made available, with the most generous liberality, to those 
engaged in such studies ; and in him, the friend is no less regretted in private life, 
than the veteran is missed from the fields of science. 
