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Memoirs of Professor Heyne, of Göttingen.

fessor, and through his means I procured this and the other book. As for a regular plan of study, that was out of the question. The lectures that I could attend were very few: for it was not even yet decided what I should study. The old clergyman destined me for divinity, and as I still hoped for some assistance from him, I took care to encourage his expectations. At length he sent me a few dollars, and continued to do so occasionally; but as I never received any thing without much previous solicitation, when it did come it was never sufficient to pay what I owed. If I applied for farther succour, I got nothing but letters full of the sharpest reproaches, and the unfeeling man went so far as to add an epithet to my name on the direction of a letter, which humbled me not a little.*

"In this manner was I reduced to situations in which I became the prey of despair. Without any principles instilled by education, without any settled character, without friend, guide, or adviser, I cannot conceive how I supported my self under these trials. What drove me into the world was not ambition, or the juvenile idea of attaining a distinguished rank in the republic of letters. I was incessantly pursued by a mortifying sense of my low condition, of the want of a good education and exterior polish. A resolute defiance of fate contributed most to inspire me with fortitude even when my situation was most deplorable. One single kind heart I met with in the servant of the house, who daily laid out her own money to supply my most urgent wants, and risked almost all she had, when she saw me reduced to such extreme necessity. Did I but know where to find this good, tender creature, with what pleasure would I return her kindness to me!

"About the end of the first year, I became acquainted with Professor Christ. As his lectures were but thinly attended it was easy to obtain admission to them. This professor had a certain sense of elegance. My exterior had nothing to recommend me; he permitted me nevertheless to visit him, handed me a book, desired me to sit down, sometimes conversed with me, and at others, gave me lessons on propriety and impropriety. I began to feel that I was deficient in plan and method; he encouraged me to follow the example of Scaliger, to begin with the most ancient of the classics,

The address of this letter was: A Msr. Heyae, Etudiant négligeant à L....

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and thus go through regularly with the whole series. Accordingly, I commenced with Herodotus. How ill this plan is adapted for academic studies must be sufficiently obvious. I pursued it nevertheless for a considerable time, whilst I could borrow the necessary books. Such was my indiscreet application to study, that for above half a year, I allowed myself only two nights' sleep in a week; ti at length I was attacked with a fever, from which I recovered with difficulty. Christ's lectures were a tissue of all sorts of digressions, but contained some excellent observations. Single ideas were often all that I needed to set me about pursuing them myself.

"The judicious conciseness, solidity, and method of Professor Ernesti fixed my attention more firmly. In my other courses there was no plan. I attended Winkler's philosophical lectures, but was unable to pay the fee. The auditors were accustomed to take great liberties, and among other things, would express their disapprobation by scraping with their feet on the floor. Being once received by some of them in this manner, I conceived such a dislike of the place, that I never went again. The bedell, however, called upon me soon afterwards for the fee, and I was obliged to con trive means to raise the money.

"Meanwhile my necessities increased to the highest pitch. Never was I so fortunate as to obtain either of the usual aids, a free table or a stipend. My old godfather left me more than half a year without assistance; at last he promised to come himself: he did actually come, but went away again without giving me the smallest trifle. This disappointment, after such long and anxious expectation, put me out of all temper. Overwhelmed with despair, I sought death in every way. I had no table, and very often not a farthing to buy a bit of bread for my dinner.

"Under circumstances so unfavourable both for the mind and body, I was sent for one Sunday by Professor Christ. He offered me the situation of tutor in the family of a Mr. Von Häseler, in the duchy of Magdeburg. This prospect, flattering as it appeared on the one hand, gave me no less concern on the other. I had not yet been two years at Leipzig, and so far from having finished, had as good as not begun my studies. I was aware that if I left them thus unfinished, I should be fit for nothing as long as I lived. A violent struggle took place within me, and lasted several days. I

Proceedings of the Royal Institute of France.

cannot conceive how I mustered up the courage to decline the offer, and to determine to pursue the object which had brought me to Leipzig.

"Several weeks passed and I was often

PROCEEDINGS OF PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES.

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Proceedings of the Royal Institute of France.

from six to nine feet high issued from it, studded the plain like mole hills, and exist to this day; and lastly, there rose, in the direction from S. S. E. to N. N. E. a range of six hills, the largest of which is not less than 1600 feet high and has yet a fiery crater. These alarming operations of nature lasted from September, 1759, to the February following. Eyewitnesses attest, that the noise was equal to that which thousands of pieces of cannon could have produced, and that it was accompanied by an intense heat, which still partly subsists; for M. de Humboldt found the heat of the soil to be 20 degrees higher than that of the atmosphere. Every morning thousands of columns of smoke rise from the cones and clefts of this plain; the water of the two rivers, before cold, is now hot and impregnated with sulphurated hydrogen, and vegetation is but just beginning to recover on this desolated spot.

This volcano is about 46 leagues from the sea and at about the same distance from the nearest active volcano; and on this occasion M. de Humboldt remarks that several volcanoes of the New World are as far from the sea as this; whereas, in the Old, we know of but one which is at a greater distance from it than twelve leagues, while most of them are upon the coast. This intelligent traveller also informs us that all the great volcanoes of Mexico are not only nearly upon a line crossing the direction of the Cordilleras, but also under the same parallel, within a few minutes, as if they had all been thrown up on a subterraneous chasm, extending from sea to sea.

BOTANY AND VEGETABLE PHYSICS.

M. de Humboldt, in a memoir on the vegetation of the Canary Islands, has favoured us with some general considerations on the geography of plants; and by combining the results of observation with the two-fold influence which the latitude and the elevation in the atmosphere exercise upon the temperature, he has fixed for a certain number of points, the limits of perpetual snow, the mean temperature of the air at that limit for the whole year, as well as the particular temperature of the winter and summer months; and has shown, that from these different data may be deduced the habitual distance between this limit and that of the elevations to which trees and shrubs ascend; and even that the apparently capricious varieties, which the same species of trees exhibit in different climates, may be accounted for when we combine with these data the consideration

NEW MONTHLY Mag,—No, 15,

237

of the season of the year, in which each
tree acquires its developement.

M.

It has long been known that the number of stigmata is not invariable in the family of the cyperus, and it was not conceived that its variations were sufficiently important to serve as a foundation for distinctions of genera. Schkuhr, a German botanist, first observed, that in the carer, or sedge genus, there are species with two and three stigmata, and that the number of these organs is always the same as that of the angles of the fruit. Our colleague the Baron de Beauvois, has applied this observation to all the plants of the family; he has especially remarked some that have four stigmata, and whose fruit is manifestly quadrangular, at least, in some of its parts: such are, in particular, the schanus mariscus, the gahnia psittacorum of M. de la Billardière, and a new and very remarkable genus brought from the Cape by M. Du Petit Thouars, and which M. de Beauvois names tetraria, on account of the repetition of the number four in the different parts of its flower. From his observations he concludes, that the number of the stigmata is of more than sufficient importance to furnish generic characters, as some genera of the cyperus comprehend so many species that it is very difficult to arrange them.

M. de Beauvois has also made some new observations which, as he thinks, corroborate the opinion that he has long maintained on the fructification of mosses, namely, that the green dust which fills the urns, and which Hedwig considers as the seed, is nothing but the pollen, and that the real seed is inclosed in what is termed by botanists, the columella of M. de Beauvois has actually the urn. remarked, that the green dust is at first, like the pollen, a mere compact and shapeless mass, which gradually acquires consistence, and at last separates into a powder; the grains of which are connected by minute fibres, and each composed of two or three small cells full of humour that may be compared with the aura seminalis of common pollen, and intermixed with other smaller, opaque and oval grains. This successive division takes place also in regard to the powder contained in the kidney-shaped bodies of the lycopodiums, and in the inside of the fungi, called lycoperdons or fuz-balls. The small central body hitherto considered as a columella, which differs in form in different genera, but retains green dust nearly one and the same shape in the 2 I same genus, and to which the VOL. III.

a

238

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is in no instance attached, terminates in an appendage which runs into the lid of the urn and drops off with this lid; so that then this columella is open, doubt less, to facilitate the egress of the small grains which M. de Beauvois has observed in it, and which he takes to be seeds. This distinguished botanist has, lastly, observed, that in the polytrichum and other mosses, the small fibres which Hedwig conceived to be anthers, continue entire after the powder of the urn has acquired its fall developement. Now the reverse ought to be the case if these

fibres were male organs; they ought to have performed their part and to be emptied before the green dust, which would be the seed, had arrived at complete maturity; hence M. de Beauvois concludes, that they are more probably the female organs. The mosses must therefore be polygamous; for M. de Beauvois shews elsewhere that these small opaque grains which he observed in the columella, were also seen, and even represented by Hedwig, at least in the bryum striatum; consequently the urns of mosses are, incontestably, according to this naturalist, hermaphrodite flowers.

M. du Petit Thouars has submitted to the Class some interesting observations in vegetable physics, and among others one which clearly shows the connection of the leaves with the ligneous stratum of the same year. When a leaf fails, you see at the foot of its stalk a number of points, which vary according to the form of the leaf and the number of 1 aflets of which it is composed. These are the sections of as many fibres, which are the vessels, or rather the bundles of fibres of the leaf. If you examine the scar left on the bark by the leaf so detached, you perceive the like points, and may follow the fibres into the interior of the wood; but if the same observation be made in spring upon a leaf recently expanded, the fibres will be found to go no farther than the surface of the wood. It is not till after two or three months that a new stratum of wood, by its intermediate formation, incloses them in its substance.

The same botanist has made some curious remarks on the proportion between the number of the stamina and that of the other parts of the flower, and has found that in several genera, such as the polygonum, the rheum, and others, in which this proportion seemed extremely variable and irregular, the number of the stamina is equal to the sum of

[April 1,

the divisions of the calix and pistils added together. This is a singular fact, the connection of which with the general structure of the flower is not easy to be perceived.

M. Desvaux has presented a memoir on a family of cryptogamous plants, called alge, comprehending, among others, all the marine plants known by the name of fuci. He proposes the adoption of several new genera; and has made experiments to ascertain whether the fibres by which the fuci adhere to the rocks and to the bottom of the sea, be really roots or not. For this purpose, after removing several feet of these natural adherences, he fastened them to stones by cords or other artificial means, and plunged them again into the sea: on examining them some time afterwards, he found that they had grown considerably. It has indeed been long known that several species, as the fucus natans, live and thrive extremely well, without any kind of adhesion.

M. Lamouroux, professor at Caen, has at different times transmitted several memoirs on the same plants, which his proximity to the sea affords him such facilities for observing, and to which he gives the name of Thalassiophytes. After enumerating all the divisions of which they are susceptible, he has considered them in relation to their uses for the food of man and beasts, for rural and domestic economy, and for the necessary or elegant arts. It is astonishing to find to what a multiplicity of useful and agreeable purposes vegetables so little noticed are applied by different nations: some are eaten as they are, or yield a palatable and nourishing jelly; others are an important resource for cattle in the frozen regions of the north; all of them furnish soda or manure, services of no mean importance. These afford sugar, and those dyes: whilst from others are made mats, drinking vessels, even musical instruments, and the moss of Corsica, as it is called, is a valuable medicine.

M. de Saint Hilaire has directed his attention to the families of plants in which the placenta, or that part of the fruit to which the seeds adhere, is single and placed in the middle of the fruit like a column or an axis. When the top of this column is free, it would appear that the way by which the influences of the pollen are transmitted from the pistil to the secd, must be very complicated, and that this must be effected by means of vessels dispersed over the sides themselves of the fruit, penetrating into the

1815.].

Proceedings of the Royal Institute of France.

placenta at its base, and running to the seeds by the side of the sap vessels. Such is actually the course of these vessels in the amarantaceæ, according to M. de St. Hilaire; but he has remarked, that in most of the plants of the class which he is studying, and particularly in the primulacea, portulacea, and caryophylla, fecundation is effected in a more direct way, and that for this purpose there are at first extremely minute vessels running from the bottom of the style to the top of the placenta. These vessels go away after fecundation, and it is not till then that the top of the placenta beM. de Saint Hilaire also comes free. adopts as invariable the existence of a point or pore distinct from the umbilicus by which the fecundating vessels arrive at the seed.

The pisang, banana, or Adam's figtree, is an herbaceous plant, that grows to the height of a tree, and is remarkable for the prodigious size of its leaves, as well as the utility of its fruit, which fur nishes the inhabitants of the torrid zone with one of the chief articles of their subsistence. Cultivation has multiplied its varieties to such a degree, that there are perhaps as many sorts of it as we have of pears or apples; and that it is very difficult to distinguish the primitive species which there may be among them. Botanists, therefore, differ much in their enumerations of the species, and in the characters which they assign to them, M. Desvaux, who has collected all that observers have said concerning the various bananas, the diversity of their fruit, and their uses, reckons up forty-four varieties in the common species, or Musa paradisiaca L. and three other species distinct from the former, namely, the Musa sapientum L. the Musa occinea, pretty generally cultivated in the hot-houses of France, and the Enseté, described by Bruce in his Travels.

A tree whose fruit has undergone still more numerous modifications in consequence of culture than that of the banana is the fig. The Marquis de Suffren, who resides in Provence, a country so long famous for the excellence of its figs, perceiving that agriculturists are far from being accurately acquainted with all the good varieties suitable to each kind of soil and situation, and that they do not derive from this valuable tree all the benefit which it is capable of affording, has undertaken to examine and describe with care the different kinds of figs cultivated on the coast of the Mediterranean from Genoa to Perpignan, He has

200

already collected coloured figures, accu-
rate descriptions, and the concordance
of the nomenclature of 172 varieties;
though his general survey is not com
pleted, as he has not yet done with Pro-
reuce, nor visited the coast of Langue-
The specimen submitted to the
dc.
class bespeaks a work of great utility to
the southern departments.

M. Thiébaut de Berneaux, who intends
to publish a French translation of the
works of Theophrastus, and the more
clearly to identify the plants noticed by
that celebrated successor of Aristotle,
has partly executed his plan of visiting
the countries where those plants grow,
has submitted to the Class some of the
results which he has obtained, not only
in regard to the species of which Theo-
phrastus treats, but also to those men-
tioned by other Greek and Latin writers.
Thus, the chara, which Cæsar's troops
so luckily discovered under the walls of
Dyrrachium, and whose root preserved
them from famine, was well worth the
trouble of a search. That name is at
present given to a small aquatic herb,
which certainly cannot support human
life; and as to the chara of Cæsar, there are
almost as many opinions as there are
botanists who have bestowed any atten-
tion upon the subject. M. de Berneaux,
after successively examining all these
opinions, offers one of which Clusius
alone had any notion. He shews that
the chara must resemble the cabbage,
and conjectures that it is the plant now
known by the name of crambe tataria,
This plant is actually very common in
the vicinity of Dyrrachium, and through
out all Hungary and Turkey: its roots
are very long, thick, firm, and well-fla-
voured; they are eaten either raw
boiled in all the countries abovemen-
tioned, and are of great service in times
of scarcity.

or

As

Several Latin writers give the name of ulva to various kinds of marsh-plants: but they particularly apply this denomi nation to one which, according to them, affords excellent food for sheep. there is scarcely any other aquatic plant than the festuca fluitans that sheep seem fond of, and as this grass covers great part of the marshes of Italy, M. de Berneaux conceives it to be this particular species of ulva. He shows that all the passages in which it is mentioned apply perfectly well to the festuca, and that it is precisely the saine grass to which Theophrastus and the Greeks give the appellation of typhu.

The ancients have highly cxtolled the