366 
Professor Britton’s and Judge Brown’s “ Illustrated Flora of the 
Northern States and Canada.” The two works, differing much in 
scope and purpose, may be taken together as, in some sort, a 
measure of the widely extended interests and activities connected 
with the study of our flora which has especially marked the last 
decade. More than this, they may be understood as being actually 
an organic part of these very movements—the agency through 
which a widely diffused subjective interest has found, as inevitably 
it must have found, its adequate concrete expression. 
It is gratifying to note the large measure of accord between 
the two works ; and, after all, most of the points of disaccord may 
be taken as evidence that our knowledge is still in a formative 
stage and subject to widely different understandings. But later 
understandings based on our present lights have so often recently 
proved to be the correct ones that the generally forward attitude 
of the “ Illustrated Flora” can scarcely fail to make its pages on 
many points a final court of appeal. 
The “Synoptical Flora”’ covers far the wider field and will be 
indispensible outside of the boundaries set down for the “ Illus- 
trated Flora.” Within these boundaries the latter will fill a posi- 
tion of authority and usefulness such as no other publication 
relating to our flora has hitherto enjoyed. 
Certainly no previous period of our botanical history has been 
enriched with any benefit at all commensurate in proportions and 
value to that which these works now confer. 
Ne dae 
Report on the Coal and Lignite of Alaska. W.H. Dall, 17th Ann. 
Rept. U. S. Geol. Survey, Part 1, 763-908. /. 48—s58 and il- 
lust. in text. 1896. 
This report contains numerous references to the fossil vegeta- 
tion found at the various localities, and Appendix I. to the report 
consists of a complete enumeration of the fossil flora as far as 
known, together with a table of distribution for both America and 
the Old World, by Dr. F. H. Knowlton. It is almost entirely 
of tertiary age. A. H. 
