214 Rhodora [OCTOBER 
in North America has been more carefully studied botanically than 
New England” the reviewer may appropriately confine his judgment 
of the book largely to this and the adjacent regions which, in view 
of the availability of information, should be among the most accurately 
described areas discussed in the book. 
The first part contains chapters on History and Bibliography. 
Many familiar names appear in this portion which, although it is 
by no means complete, will give some impression of the amount of 
work done by others, and may possibly be suggestive to those who 
wish to carry the subject to something like completeness. But it is 
singular that there should be enumerated among the most important 
students of the New England flora Charles E. Hamlin (a geologist 
whose name wandered into certain botanical papers because of his 
geological and physiographic work upon Mt. Katahdin) and some 
others who at most have published only one or two very minor notes; 
while no mention either in the historical sketch or the bibliography 
is made of such critical and scholarly students of the New England 
flora as Bicknell, F. S. Collins, Dame, Davenport, A. A. Eaton, 
E. H. Eames, Evans, C. B. Graves, Isaac Holden, Harger, Nichols, 
Thaxter, Webster and Wiegand. All such omissions are probably 
meant to be covered by the statement that owing to the number of 
workers and papers “it is incumbent on the writer to refer to only 
the most important.” But by what judgment, we may ask, is it 
decided that the botanical works of Charles E. Hamlin (the geologist) 
and some who are enumerated as important students of the flora 
of the White Mountains are of more importance as botanical contri- 
butions than Bicknell’s critical studies of the flora of Nantucket, 
F. S. Collins’s authoritative publications on the Algae and his capital 
accounts of Cape Cod, Clinton’s Ustilagineae of Connecticut, Dame € 
Collins’s Middlesex Flora, Dame & Brooks’s trustworthy Handbook 
of the Trees of New England, Evans & Nichols’s Bryophytes of Con- 
necticut and their many critical discussions of New England Bryo- 
phytes, or the Connecticut Botanical Society’s exemplary Catalogue 
of the Flowering Plants and Ferns of Connecticut by Graves, Eames, 
Bissell, Harger and others? Had the author been more familiar with 
the painstaking work of these energetic students and had he realized 
the need of emulating their accuracy and critical judgment the 
unfortunate volume which is now before us might never have been 
written. 
There is no branch of the botanical field which so much as phyto- 
geographic work demands thorough training'in exact taxonomic detail 
accompanied by the most discriminating judgment and prolonged and 
painstaking field-study. That the author of the Phytogeographic Sur- 
vey of North America has satisfactorily met these requirements must 
be doubted by many close students of our flora. Only a brief perusal 
of the book shows that for the most part it is composed of extracts 
