220 NOTICES OP BOOKS. 



been accumulated under the leading ideas conceived by Linnaeus, De 

 Candolle, and others, and present a compromise between a series of apho- 

 risms to be crammed by a student, and a treatise on botany which may 

 be read either piecemeal to a class as a lecture, or at home instead of a 

 lecture. Few tell the student of the broad principles upon which he 

 is to ground his studies, or lead him to think for himself; and some 

 of them abound in errors of detail, in loose and inaccurate expressions, 

 and in unphilosophical ideas. 



Amongst the most remarkable exceptions to this prevalent type of 

 Introductions to Botany are,— in France, De Candolle's numerous works, 

 and A. de Jussieu's « Cours Elementaire ; ' in Germany, Link's ' Ele- 

 menta Philosophise Botanicae ' and Schleiden's « Principles ; ' and in our 

 own country, Lindley's « Introduction to the Natural Orders,' his ' Ve- 

 getable Kingdom,' and Henfrey's ' Outlines of Structural and Physio- 

 logical Botany;' — all which works bear evidence of the authors having 

 observed and thought for themselves, and taken little for granted that was 

 capable of verification. In the same high rank with these, Mr. Berkeley's 

 'Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany' will take its place ; whilst in point 

 of originality and amount of independent research it has few, if any, 

 rivals in the wide field of botanical literature to which, as an introduc- 

 tory work, it belongs. 



The necessity for a really sound and comprehensive work on Crypto- 

 gamic Botany has long beer, felt in this country, nor has its place been 

 well filled in any other, for the best of the foreign ones are for the most 

 part little better than compilations, undertaken by persons whose 

 knowledge is confined either to systematic Cryptogamy and the classi- 

 ficatory branch of the science, or exclusively to the leading features in 

 the morphology and history of development of the various natural 

 orders of flowerless plants. It is not too much to say that Mr. 

 Berkeley is the only botanist in Europe who to an accurate and com- 

 prehensive knowledge of the orders, genera, and species of Thallogens, 

 their structure, development, and distribution, adds a general sound 



all 



physiology 



and diseases of flowering plants. Add to this, that he possesses an excel- 

 lent hbrary and herbarium, that his experience ranges over upwards of 

 forty years of continuous study, that he is a scholar, well read in the 

 literature of his science, and it follows that he is of all men the best 

 quahfied for the task he has now so ably fulfilled. That his great 



