[page] 1042

MR. DARWIN has lately published in England, under the title of The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants, a reprint of his paper on this subject printed some years ago in the Journal of the Linnæan Society of London, which first attracted public attention to the remarkable phenomena connected with the rotation of climbing stems and tendrils. A good deal of fresh matter is also inserted.

MR. DARWIN'S work on Insectivorous Plants has met with a large sale, being already in a third edition. Professor E. MORREN, of Liege, has published in the Bulletin de l'Académie Royale de Belgique a record of a series f experiments which, while they abundantly confirm the insecticidal powers of the leaves of Drosera and Pinguicula, lead him to doubt the power of absorption and digestion assigned to them by Mr. DARWIN. MM REESS and WILL, on the other hand, in the Botanische Zeitung, abundantly confirm Mr. DARWIN'S results in the case of Dionæa and Drosera, as is also the case with two independent series of observations carried on in England by Dr. LAWSON TAIT and Mr. J. W. CLARK. The former gentleman claims to have established the absorptive power of the leaves on Drosera by planting in perfectly pure silver sand plants from which the roots had been entirely removed, and feeding them with extract of beef and phosphate of ammonia; the latter by feeding the leaves with bodies of flies soaked in a solution of citrate of lithium, and then finding the lithium in other parts of the plants by means of the spectroscope.