Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 4.djvu/369

Rh lished by him in the ’Penny Magazine' for 1833. His figures of a somewhat analogous subject, the apple-blight, and the insect producing it, accompany Sir Joseph Banks's memoir on the introduction of that disease into England, in the second volume of the Transactions of the Horticultural Society.

Mr. Bauer had commenced, before the close of the last century, a series of drawings of Orchideae, and of the details of their re- markable structure, to which he made additions from time to time, as opportunities offered, nearly to the termination of his life. A selection from these, which form one of the most beautiful and ex- tensive series of his botanical drawings, was lithographed and pub- lished by Professor Lindley, between the years 1830 and 1838, under the title of " Illustrations of Orchidaceous Plants."

A paper by Mr. Bauer, entitled " Some Experiments on the Fungi which constitute the colouring matter of the Red Snow dis- covered in Baffin's Bay," was published in the Philosophical Trans- actions for 1820. By mixing the snow containing these fungi with water, he found that they could be made to vegetate, but that they produced new fungi of a green instead of a red colour. By ex- posure to excessive cold the primitive fungi are killed, but their seed still retains vitality, and, if immersed in snow, which appears to be their native soil, they reproduce new fungi, which are gene- rally of a red colour.

The Philosophical Transactions for 1823 contains the paper by Mr. Bauer already alluded to, entitled " Microscopical Observations on the Suspension of the Muscular Motions of the Vibrio tritici" which forms the Croonian Lecture for that year. This minute worm, which infests wheat, and is the immediate cause of that de- structive disease called the Ear Cockle or Purples, congregates in immense numbers in the substance of the grains thus diseased, forming masses of a white and apparently glairy mucus, which, when immersed in water, separate and exhibit, under the micro- scope, the worms in lively motion. After they have become per- fectly dry, and apparently lifeless, they may be readily revived by being moistened with a drop of water, when they become as lively as before. Mr. Bauer determined, by a series of experiments, that the ova of these worms are conveyed into the cavities of the ger- mens by the circulating sap. On inserting some of the worms into sound grains of wheat, and allowing them to germinate, he found the worms, in different stages of their growth, in the stalk, and ulti- mately in the germens of the new plant.

In the year 1816 he commenced lending the assistance of his pencil to Sir Everard Home, in the various anatomical and physiological investigations in which the latter was engaged ; and in the course of ten or twelve years furnished, in illustration of Sir Everard's numerous papers in the Philosophical Transactions, more than a hundred and twenty plates, which were afterwards reprinted in his 'Lectures on Comparative Anatomy.' These plates, which form together the most extensive series of Mr. Bauer's published works, embraced a great variety of important subjects, chiefly in