143 



Classified, mounted, and, so to say, illustrated by modern examples 

 of the same flowers and plants, they fill eleven cases — a collection 

 absolutely unique, and likely ever to remain so. The hues of these 

 Old World flowers are said to be as brilliant as those of their 

 modern prototypes; and, but for the labels which show them to be 

 three thousand years apart, no ordinary observer could distinguish 

 between those which were buried with the Pharaohs and those which 

 were gathered and dried only a few months ago.- — Academy^ Sept. 

 23rd 1882, quoted by Trimen's Journal of Botany. 



Botanical Literature- 



Symbolae Licheno-Mycologicae, Beitrage ziir Kenntniss der Grenzen 

 zwischen Flechten tmd Pihen^ von Dr. Arthur Minks. Zweiter 

 Theil. 8vo. pp. 273. Kassel u. Berlin: Theodor Fischer, 1882. 

 This second volume of the laborious work of Dr. Minks is now 

 published, and commends itself to botanists interested in the often 

 undisputedly questionable relations of what have heretofore been 

 taken for discomycetous and pyrenomycetous Fungi to Lichens, as a 

 most carefully elaborated, and wholly new contribution to their 

 history. The difficulty of this author's later writings recurs indeed 

 here, that they presuppose an exceptional ability of microscopical 

 manipulation, and an acquaintance with very minute structure which^ 

 in the field he occupies, no one perhaps fully shares with him; but it 

 is not easy to believe that a genuine interest in the plants he investi- 

 gates {to a considerable extent North American) can be satisfied 

 without estimating the value of his results. The old reverence for 

 species as ideal centres, which it was the naturalist's task to seek 

 amid the boundless luxuriance of difference in nature, has been 

 shaken, to say the least, by the preposessions engendered by Dar- 

 win's thought; and the hosts ever-growing of " n* spp." with which the 

 very existence, as scientific disciplines, of the classes brought together 

 in thallophytal botany is threatened, find but scant opposition; yet 

 surely no one can question that a competent and sincere attempt to 

 exhaust the structural history of an obscure organism is worth vastly 

 more than any diaejnosis of it. That is no sufficient estimate of the 

 systematist's toils which would reduce' their result to a mere ticketing 

 of natural objects, the largely accidental and arbitrary character of 

 which work, in whatever hands, can only be relieved in so far as it is 

 possible to confine it to the most experienced inquirers, to be accepted, 

 in good part no doubt blindly, by the rest. But is there not more 

 than this in the study of the system of nature ? And can such study 

 be really scientific if it content itself without taking account of the 

 observations and results, and the criticism of genera and species of so 

 honest and thorough-going, whether or not now, like all others mis- 

 taken an investigator as Minks ? — E. Tuckerman. 



Serial Publications. 

 Proceedings of the Davenport Academy of Science. Vol. iii., Part ii. 



(August.) — 'Contributions to the Flora of Iowa,' by J. C. 

 Arthur ; ' Two new Species ol Oxytheca ' {O. caryophylloides and 

 O. Partshn)^ by C. C. Parry. 



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