Acquisitions of the Natural History Museum

Abstract

A SERIES of microscope preparations showing all the early stages in the life history of the graptolite Climacograptus has been presented to the Department of Geology of the Natural History Museum by the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge. The preparations were made by Mr. Ian Cox from material which he collected from rocks of Ordovician age in Akpatok Island, Ungava Bay, Northern Territory, Canada. Graptolites occur in the oldest fossiliferous rocks, and are organisms of unknown relationships, but generally supposed zoologically to resemble the living sea-firs, or sertularians?minute colonies of polyps encased in a horny skeleton. In the material from Akpatok Island, the original horny skeleton is preserved in a matrix of limestone, which can be dissolved and the skeleton extracted entire. The minutest structure and ornament of the early chambers, or thecæ, are visible, and the order and manner of budding of new thecæ can be clearly determined. Miss K. B. Macvicar has presented the extensive herbarium of her brother, Dr. Symers M. Macvicar, to the Department of Botany. Dr. Macvicar was the recognised British authority on Hepaticæ and was the author of the standard systematic account of them,?The Student?s Handbook of British Hepatics?. The herbarium is very rich in British and Continental species, and these are the more valuable because they are the basis of the descriptions and comparisons in the?Handbook?. Dr. Macvicar was a medical man whose home was at Acharacle, Argyll, and in his travels in western Scotland accumulated an unrivalled representation of the flora, particularly of the less frequented parts of Argyll and Inverness. The herbarium contains about 18,000 specimens (that is, labels) and, as well as hepatics and flowering plants, contains mosses, seaweeds, and lichens. Mr. A. H. G. Alston, assistant keeper in the department, has just returned from western Greek Macedonia, where, in company with Mr. N. Y. Sandwith, of the Kew Herbarium, he spent six weeks. He collected about 1200 specimens, chiefly flowering plants. These are of interest because the area along the Albanian frontier has been visited previously only by a Czechoslovakian collector? moreover, the districts visited overlap to some extent those from which some plants were obtained by the department during the War.