NOTICES OF BOOKS. 349 



descriptions, with very often observations on the chief peculiarities or 

 comparative characters of the species, follow. The localities are selected 

 and arranged with great care and judgment, are quite full enough, and 

 not overloaded with names of collectors or of localities ; they are, in 

 short, always sufficiently precise without being pedantically long. In 

 all these matters, and they are of the greatest importance to working 

 botanists, Dr. Weddell's work is worthy of imitation ; we write under 

 a smarting: sense of the intolerable amount of useless labour some 



■ 



continental botanists ruthlessly demand of us, by giving specific cha- 

 racters of a page and more long, containing descriptions of the genus, 

 order, and often of the class too, followed by an unarranged and often, 

 in part, unintelligible list of habitats and localities, where the same 

 fact is often stated in several different forms, all tending, in most cases, 

 to prove that the author does not know the character of his plants, nor 

 the geography of its habitats, and that he has not the skill to detect 

 the one, and will not take the trouble to learn the other. 



Synonymy has proved the greatest enemy to Dr. Weddell's progress ; 

 he has collected and verified upwards of 1000 synonyms ! for the 470 

 species described; and when it is considered that upwards of 100 of 

 these 470 species are described for the first time by Weddell himself, 

 either in the ■ Monographic ' or in his previous preparatory review of 

 the Order, and that at least another 100 are either doubtful species or 

 are unknown to him, it may well be imagined that, great as is the ser- 

 vice he has rendered to the Order, it is yet far from completely relieved 

 of this incubus. It is evident that each of the 370 previously described 

 species has about four ascertained names on the average. Some 

 indeed have an incredible number; thus Parietaria is reduced to 

 8 species, of which P. officinalis has 8 synonyms, and P. debilis 14 ; 

 Pouzolzia ovalis has 11 synonyms, P. Indica has 25 ; Bcehmeria nivea 

 (the famous China Grass) has 8, B. platyphylla upwards of 30, and 

 the common Nettle (Urtica urens) 12. 



A review of a carefully executed work of this description is very sug- 

 gestive of speculations on the future advance of this branch of botany, 

 founded on the opportunities available at the present time. Dr. Wed- 

 dell, having exhausted more than the means usually at a monographist's 

 disposal for gaining a full knowledge of his subject, finds that out of 

 370 species described by others, there are nearly 100 of which he has 

 not been able to obtain a personal knowledic^, and yet this is an Order 

 whose species are easily pn served, and the specimens generally charac- 



