number of medical schools which require some sort of preliminary examination for admission is also increasing. A great deal is expected of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical College (which are handsomely endowed) when they shall be in operation. Several chairs have been endowed in the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Vanderbilt's recent magnificent gift was for a lot and building and not for endowment, but the donor set the excellent example of aiding an already tried institution instead of launching a new one among the many which are at present struggling to float. The work accomplished in the past ten years by physicians themselves through their various societies and organizations in exposing quackery, injurious patent medicines, malpractice, and bargaining in diplomas for which no study has ever been expended, has revealed and corrected an enormous amount of abuse and crime, notwithstanding the very tardy legal and popular support which has attended these efforts. Our great need is a little more system and concentration of energy, or a diversion of some of the wide-spread public interest in general medical topics toward securing and demanding the most thorough medical education for every one who seeks to become a physician. This will be of incalculable service to the entire country; and endowments, whether by State legislation or private bequests and subscriptions, combined with State or national supervision of licenses to practice, will so far advance the thoroughness of work at home by making it independent of large or small classes of students, that we may hope before long to invite foreign students to learn from us how to take the lead in medical education.
| INSECT FERTILIZATION OF FLOWERS[1] |
By Dr. W. J. BEHRENS.
OF insects the Coleoptera, the Lepidoptera, the Diptera, and the Hymenoptera are the orders most concerned in the fertilization of flowers. More rarely, fertilization is effected by one or other species of Hemiptera, Neuroptera, and Orthoptera, but these are not of sufficient importance to demand further attention here. We shall therefore confine our remarks to the orders constituting the former group, and consider the various physical peculiarities by which insects belonging to them are enabled to effect the end in question. Such peculiarities chiefly take the form of special structures (invariably confined to the head), by means of which the insects are enabled to reach and abstract the honey contained in the flower. We shall also have to consider the organs concerned in the transport of the pollen.
- ↑ From "Text-Book of General Botany," by Dr. W. J. Behrens, of Göttingen. Translation from the second German edition. Revised by Patrick Geddes, F. R. S. E. Edinburgh: Young J. Pentland, 1885.
