NOTICES OF BOOKS. 251 
at Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, where he had been for some 
years Colonial Secretary, and where he was no less respected and be- 
loved than he was by all who had the privilege of his acquaintance in 
England. The botany of Great Britain had chiefly engaged his atten- 
tion. In the Linnean Society's Transactions, he published ‘ On Sys- 
tems and Methods in Natural History,” and a “Monograph of the 
British species of Juncus.” 
CEREUS TRIANGULARIS. 
Lieut. Agassiz has sent us a drawing of a plant of Cereus triangularis 
which has recently blossomed ina stove in this country, bearing flowers 
of a most extraordinary size. The length of the flower, accurately 
measured, is fourteen inches from the base of the ovary to the tip of 
the petals; the breadth, from tip to tip of the calyx, fourteen inches: 
the petals form a cup and are nearly erect, but they measure eight 
inches across the mouth of the cup, and the petals are seven inches 
long, including their curve: the calyx-tube eight inches long. The 
weight is nearly a pound. The stem was of the ordinary size. This 
species is well figured in the ‘ Botanical Magazine,’ tab. 1884, in the 
year 1817, and in the ‘ Botanical Register,’ tab. 1807, in the year 1837, 
although the author of the latter work says it had never previously 
been represented from an European specimen. But the fact is, it 
was first figured more than a century ago, in the Acta Nature 
Curiosorum, from a plant which flowered at Altorf. 
NOTICES OF BOOKS. 
De VRIESE (Dr. and Professor) ; Descriptions et Figures des PLANTES - 
NovvELLES et Rares du Jardin Botanique de V Université de LEIDE 
et des principaux Jardins du Royaume des Pays Bas. Ouvrage dédié 
à sa Majesté la Reine. Livraison II. Imp. folio, 1851. 
We gave, as we had most just reason for doing, in the Tth volume 
of the ‘London Journal of Botany,’ a highly favourable notice of the 
first livraison of this splendid work, a publication as remarkable for 
the beauty of the Plates, which are coloured, as for the scientific value 
of the descriptions. The first figure in the present fasciculus repre- 
sents a new species of Hymenocallis, H. Borskiana, De Vriese, from 
