NOTICES OF BOOKS. 313 



the case of Berkeley's 'Introduction/ orLindley's 'Vegetable Kingdom; 3 

 or when the book is written to meet the demand of public schools and 

 national institutions, as Gray's € Lessons;' or when written by men of 

 eminence, who treat the subject with originality as well as learning, as 

 in the case of the work before us. 



Professor Henfrey is well known to be a distinguished botanist, and 

 the most skilful and accomplished working physiologist in England, 

 and he is also an able and assiduous professor of many years' standing. 

 During a long period he has had to expound annually his own special 

 branch of botany, as well as the morphological, structural, and systematic, 

 all of which he has diligently studied, to considerable classes of chiefly 

 medical students, who came before him in most cases profoundly igno- 

 rant of the commonest attributes of the vegetable kingdom. How to 

 deal with such a class, as that the moderately industrious amongst 

 them shall in three short months obtain a creditable minimum acquaint- 

 ance with the chief laws of vegetable life, is indeed no easy problem, 

 but is that which he has set himself to master. Ten years ago, Mr. 

 Henfrey says, he attempted to meet the difficulty in part, by publishing 

 his ' Outlines of Structural and Physiological Botany,' a valuable and 

 very carefully written work, but too detailed and profound for the pur- 

 pose intended, and of which, with a candour which does him honour, 

 he now says further that he entertains "a gradually strengthening 

 conviction, derived from experience in lecturing, that the arrangement 

 of the matter in the c Outlines' was not that best adapted for the in- 

 struction of those for whose use it was intended." Without then at 

 all undervaluing Physiological Botany, the elements of which we think 

 every one should be taught, whether intended for the medical profes- 

 sion or not, we entirely concur with him in the course he has adopted 

 in the present work, regarding which he says : " In the meantime we 

 subordinate it to the other branches in practical teaching, and in this 

 volume have dealt with it in what we regard as its proper place in the 

 order of study." Again, he says: "To direct the attention of the stu- 

 dents to a series of isolated facts and abstract propositions relating to 

 the elementary anatomy of plauts, is to cause him to charge his memory 

 or his note-book with materials in which he can take but little interest, 

 from his incapacity to perceive their value or applications. But if we 

 endeavour to seize the floating conceptions furnished by common expe- 

 rience, and to fix and define them by a course of exact practical obscr- 



VOL IX. 



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