Flora of Middlesex county. Published by the Middlesex Insti

tute.

- Professor E. T. Cox, formerly director of the Geological Survey of Indiana, is engaged in examinations of the antimony mines in Sonora.

- Dr. C. Parona, of Pavia, has recently published an essay on the Acinetæ in general, and described a new Italian form.

-The triennial meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers was held in Philadelphia, Feb. 15, 1881.

-:0:

PROCEEDINGS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES.

BOSTON SOCIETY OF NATURAL HISTORY, Jan. 19.-The meeting was devoted to archæological topics. Dr. C. C. Abbott, of Trenton, N. J., discussed the evidences of paleolithic man in the valley of the Delaware. Professor Henry W. Haynes compared the argillite implements found by Mr. Abbott with those of the palæolithic age in Europe. The Rev. G. Fred. Wright considered the age of the Delaware gravels. Remarks on these subjects were made by Mr. F. W. Putnam and others.

Feb. 2. Mr. William Trelease spoke of the fertilization of Salvia splendens by birds. Mr. F. C. Bowditch remarked on the economy of the beehive. Mr. F. W. Putnam exhibited an Indian relic from the peat; and Mr. Lucien Carr spoke of the raising of corn by the Indians east of the Mississippi.

TROY SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION, Jan. 17, 1881.-Mr. Wm. E. Hagan read a paper on the intellectual development of the United States.

NEW YORK Academy of ScienceS, Jan. 3.—Mr. Thomas Bland read a paper on the relations of the flora and fauna of Santa Cruz, West Indies.

Jan. 10.-Dr. George M. Beard lectured on trance, or so-called hypnotism or somnambulism, its nature symptoms and varieties, with especial reference to mesmeric trance. His experiments were conducted on a class of human objects that have been under Dr. Beard's training, and with especial reference to the errors of prominent European observers.

APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN CLUB, Jan. 12.-President Cross delivered the annual address on the subject of barometric measurement of heights; and Professor J. R. Edmands read a paper on schemes for Appalachian maps.

MIDDLESEX INSTITUTE, Jan. 5.-Frank S. Collins read a paper on "Darwinism." Twelve new names were added to the list of members. The first publication of The Institute was issued in the form of a catalogue of the plants of Malden, Medford and vicinity, with blank pages for notes preparatory to the final compilation. of a complete catalogue of the counties' flora.

AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY, Jan. 11.-Commander J. R. Bartlett, U.S.N., read a paper on the recent investigations of the Gulf Stream by the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey steamer Blake. Jan. 25.-Gen. G. W. Callum read a paper on the Land of Egypt.

SELECTED ARTICLES IN SCIENTIFIC SERIALS.

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND ARTS.-February. Notes on Alaska and the vicinity of Behring strait, by W. H. Dall. Relation of Devonian insects to later and existing types, by S. H. Scudder. Date of the Glacial era in Eastern North America, by G. F. Wright. A new genus and species of air-breathing mollusk from the coal measures of Ohio, by R. P. Whitfield. Principal characters of American Jurassic Dinosaurs, by O. C. Marsh, Part IV.

ANNALS AND MAGAZINE OF NATURAL HISTORY. - December, 1880. Note on Pterygodermatites macdonaldii, the type of a new order of Vermes, by G. E. Dobson. On the minute structure of the recent Heteropora neozelanica and on the relations of the genus Heteropora to Monticulipora, by H. A. Nicholson. On the northern species of Buccinum, by J. G. Jeffreys. On the organization and development of the Gordii, second note by A. Villot.

GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE-January. On the ornithosaurians from the Upper Greensand of Cambridge, by H. G. Seeley.

QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MICROSCOPICAL SCIENCE-January. On the germination and histology of the seedling of Welwitschia mirabilis. by F. O. Bower. On the head-cavities and associated nerves of Elasmobranchs, by A. M. Marshall. Contributions to the minute anatomy of the nasal mucous membrane, by E. Klein. Histological Notes, by E. Klein. On the intra-cellular digestion and endoderm of Limnocodium, by E. R. Lankester. (Shows that in the Cœlenterates, as previously shown by Metschnikoff, the endodermal cell take in natural food materials. In the fresh water medusa Lankester has studied the amoeboid endodermal cells during life and seen them take in natural food materials, such as Protococcus and Euglena-like forms. He cites the observation of Parke, who saw a diatom completely embedded in the protoplasm of a cell of Hydra, also of Metschnikoff, who has described the inception of solid food particles by the cells lining the alimentary canal of certain Planarians.) On the microscopic numeration of the blood-corpuscles and the estimation of their hæmoglobin, by Mrs. E. Hart. Preliminary account of the development of the lampreys, by W. B. Scott. On some appearances of the red bloodcorpuscles of man and other vertebrata, by G. F. Dowdeswell. Medusa and Hydroid polyps living in fresh water, by G. J. Ro

manes.

IN the fall of 1878, while studying the structure of various

flowers, as correlated with the mode of their fertilization, I examined Salvia splendens Sellow, a Brazilian species very commonly cultivated for its large scarlet flowers. From the structure as then made out, I was partially convinced that I was not dealing with an entomophilous flower; but it was not until two years later that I had an opportunity to look into the matter any further, and I then became certain that the species was one of the more closely adapted ornithophilous plants.

The flowers, arranged in a compound raceme, are placed horizontally or nearly so. Nectar, secreted by a large, lobed disk (n), as usual in the Labiatæ, accumulates in the basal part of the corolla, and offers a considerable amount of tempting food to nectar-loving creatures, and this, advertised by the brilliant scarlet of the calyx and corolla, clearly proclaims the flowers to be zoophilous, or adapted to fertilization by animals of some kind.

The corolla is tubular, though somewhat laterally compressed, and reaches a length of not far from two inches. It possesses the bilabiate character which has given a name to the natural 1 Read before the Boston Society of Natural History, Feb. 2, 1881.

2 Professor F. Hildebrand, in his paper on the fertilization of Salvias by insects (Pringsheim's Jahrb. wiss. Bot., 1865, IV, p. 459, and Pl. 33, figs. 8 and 9), describes and figures the floral structure of a species to which he gives this name, but which is quite different from that on which my observations were made, which, it may be added, has been found to agree with authentic specimens of S. splendens in the Gray Herbarium.

order to which it belongs, and, as is generally the case with labiate flowers, the lower lip is split into three lobes, a median and two lateral, which in this case are of nearly equal size. Here, however, the lower lip-usually well developed and affording a convenient landing place for insects-is small and of little or no use for this purpose.

The style is exserted to a considerable distance, and the included portion is held quite firmly in a longitudinal fold of the upper part of the corolla tube. The forked stigma (st) is thus maintained in the median plane of the flower.

The stamens are two in number, and of the general form found in this genus. Their filaments are adherent to the corolla to within a short distance of its mouth, where they become free, and run obliquely upward and forward, terminating side by side, close beneath the base of the upper lip. The connective which in many flowers forms an inconspicuous band between the anther cells, is here prolonged, in each stamen, into a slender longitudinally-placed rod nearly an inch in length. Each connective (c) is attached at its middle by a hinge joint to the end of its filament, thus forming an oblique lever with equal arms, which lies with its anterior end a in contact with, or barely protruding from the tip of the arched upper lip of the corolla, while its posterior end a' nearly reaches the floor of the tube. If this were constructed as the stamens of related plants are, it should bear an anther cell at each end; but in reality only a single fertile cell-the anterior— is developed, the posterior cell being abortive. Moreover, the connectives of the two stamens are coherent for a short distance back of their insertion, so that the two form, in reality, a single forked lever.

When a flower first opens, the stigma is immature, its lobes being closely appressed, as shown in the upper part of Fig. 2, but the anthers are already dehiscent. In other words the species is proterandrous. Later, when some or all of the pollen has been removed, the stigmatic lobes expand, as shown in the lower part of Fig. 2, and expose the now receptive surfaces, and the style curves down into the position shown by the dotted line of Fig. 1. From my observations, I should say that the life of a given flower may be divided into three periods; in the first, the anthers only being mature, it is staminate in function; in the second, some pollen remaining in the anthers, while the stigmas

become receptive, it is functionally hermaphrodite or perfect; and in the third, the pollen having been entirely removed, while the

FIG. 1.-Young flower of Salvia splendens, seen from the side. The position of the connective and filament is shown by dotted lines, as also the position assumed by the style in older flowers. FIG. 2.-Stigmas; the upper from a newly expanded flower, the lower from a flower which has been open for some time. FIG. 3.-The nectar gland and ovary. FIG. 4.—A flower visited by a humming bird ; Figs. 1 and 4 natural size; Figs. 2 and 3, enlarged four diameters; a, indicates the fertile anther cells; a', the sterile cells; c, the connective, at the point where it is hinged to the filament; n, the nectar gland; o, the ovary; p, a perforation of the corolla, made by ants for access to the nectar; s, the stigma; st, the style.

stigma, if unfertilized, retains its freshness, it is pistillate only so far as function is concerned.

It appears at once that there is little likelihood of pollen reaching the stigma without some sort of assistance, and the proterandry decreases the chances for a given flower to be fertilized by its own pollen when such assistance is rendered, though from the apparent incompleteness of the dichogamy this may occur in some instances.

Many species of Salvia are perfectly adapted to profit by the visits of bees, usually humble bees, which, in entering the flower for nectar, encounter and elevate the posterior end of the connectives with their heads, thus bringing the polliniferous anterior end upon their backs and dusting them with pollen, which will be brushed off, in part, by the stigma of the next older flower visited. When the insect leaves the flower, the stamens, returning to their former position through the elasticity of the parts, are ready to make their bow to the next comer. Two facts, however, argue against the adaptation of the present species to bees: