298 . Recent Literature. [ ZOE 
the quality of paper and press work. Illustrating birds’ nests 
from photographs and accompanying them with descriptive 
notes is a large field and will take a long time to exhaust the 
material, but thus far the fund of new information has been but 
slightly added to. 
Planzenfamilien drags itself along in an exasperating, pecu- 
liarly German style. Hoffmann in the latest fascicle of Com- 
positee completes Cynaroideae and Mutisiacece and lacks only a 
few pages of Cichoriaceze. He makes the number of genera 806. 
The changes of interest to Western botanists are as follows: 
Cnicus is restricted to the single species known as Carbenia bene- 
dicta. Carduus is maintained with the boundaries given by 
Bentham &.Hooker and Cirsium Scop. is adopted for all the 
species with plumose pappus, known of late under the name of 
Cnicus. Serinia Raf. is substituted for Apogon Ell. and Sitilias 
Raf. for Pyrrhopappus DC.; Microseris is maintained in the 
limits of the Synoptical Flora, Calais, Uropappus, Phzeopappus, 
Ptilophora, Nothocalais, etc., being included as sections or 
synonyms; Stephanomeria is retained and Ptiloria Raf. resur- 
rected by Mr. Greene is not even mentioned in the synonymy. 
Rafinesquia Nutt. is kept up and Nemoseris Greene given as 
asynonym. In Lieferung 90, Taubert keeps up Hosackia. 
Silva of North America vol. v.—Hamamelidzee—Sapotaceae. 
By CHARLES SPRAGUE SARGENT, with fifty-four exquisite plates 
drawn by C. EK. Faxon. ‘Too’ much cannot be said in praise of 
this magnificent work, the plates of which with detailed dissec- 
tions are nearly as useful for study as the living plant, and make 
one sigh for the wasted time spent over old plates in the vain 
endeavor to find a meaning which the artist failed to give. The 
only point we can suggest for improvement is that all the dissec- 
tions in any given genus should be drawn from the same point of 
view. The plates of special interest to us in the West are 
Rhizophora Mangle, Conocarpus erecta, Laguncularia racemosa, 
Cereus giganteus, Cornus Nuttallit, Sambucus Canadensis vat. 
Mexicana, Sambucus glauca, Arbutus Menziesit, A. Xalapensis 
and A. Arizonica, raised to specific rank from a variety of A. 
Xalapensis. Sambucus callicarpa Greene is included in the 
