PLANT NAMES 
181 
lead to—-one would have thought the shape of the leaf would have 
supplied the obvious explanation. British Plant Names is a useful 
little book—a little more care and a little less speculation would have 
made it more so. 
BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, etc. 
At the meeting of the Linnean Society on April 19th, Dr. Ilendle, 
with the aid of a lantern slide, demonstrated the structure of the 
fruit of the Mare’s-tail (.Hippuris vulgaris Linn.). The figures and 
description of the fruit of this well-known British plant in the text¬ 
books and floras were unsatisfactory, and overlooked points of detail 
in structure associated with the germination of the seed. The fruit 
is a drupe, the upper portion of which around the persistent base of 
the style, with the seedcoat, is developed in the form of a stopper 
which is easily withdrawn on soaking the ripe fruit. The embryo 
ultimately fills the seed, and has the large radicle and hypocotyl so 
often found in water plants. The speaker had been unable to get 
fruits of herbarium specimens several years old to germinate, and 
suggested that Fellows interested in British botany might look out 
for seedlings during the next season. The radicle was placed directly 
beneath the stopper which provided a place of exit on germination. 
At the same meeting Dr. Daydon Jackson continued his account 
of the History of Botanic Illustration during Four Centuries presented 
to the Society in 1920: — 
Alluding to the methods of producing by printers’ ink represen¬ 
tations of plants in general, the speaker grouped the main methods 
into three : (1) where the design was in relief, and received the ink, 
which by pressure was transferred to paper, as in wood-engraving ; 
(2) where the design was cut or bitten into a plate of metal, as 
copper-plate engraving, etching, mezzotint, &c.; (3) where the 
design did not differ much in level from the stone on which it was 
drawn, but depended upon the antagonism of grease and water, the 
stone receiving either and then refusing to receive the other. 
Examples were then shown of early herbals with artless colouring, 
most of them apparently due to the work of private possessors; but 
with later years, as in a copy of Fuchs’s Stirjpium Historia , 1542, 
printed at Basel, the character of the work pointed to a trained 
colourist, such as Plantin of Antwerp employed at a later period. 
During the prevalence of woodcuts during the early years of print¬ 
ing, copper-plate engraving began to make its wa}^ and was employed 
in providing outlines for hand-colouring until the last century, when 
it was ousted by lithography. The method of printing from engraved 
plates was briefly described, and the application of mezzotint restricted 
to leaves and stems was pointed out, also Kedoute’s method of semi¬ 
stipple for coloured prints, each colour being separately applied to the 
plate and cleaned off, before finally heating the plate and pulling the 
print. A simpler method was also shown where an ordinary engrav¬ 
ing was printed in green ink, and other colours, as red or yellow, 
applied in water-colour. The three-colour process was touched upon, 
and the preparation of three (or four) half-tone blocks to print its 
