272 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



congratulated upon the completion 

 of his task, but more fortunate than 



he is the world that has received the 

 benefit of his labors. 



SPECIAL BOOKS. 



The trees, the author of this book * says, may be justly numbered among 

 our best friends. But we need to know them better. " It is not enough to 

 be able to distinguish an ash from a hickory or a fir from a spruce ; it is 

 more important by far that we should become acquainted with the form 

 and character of the leaves, the fruit, and the bark, and thus acquii-e a fuller 

 knowledge of the way the tree lives. To hnoiv a tree is to become familiar 

 with the purpose and condition of its life. This is revealed in no small 

 measure by the leaves. The needle of the pine enables the tree to with- 

 stand a hurricane on a mountain top, yet its slender figure is perfectly 

 adapted to the task of gathering light and air for the tree's life. The broad- 

 leaved buttonwood would fall before the gale which the pine successfully 

 weathers. Not less plainly does the diversity of character in a leaf reveal 

 the diversity of the tree itself. No two leaves are exactly alike ; no two 

 trees are exactly alike." Although, as he admits, it is not possible to por- 

 tray all the beauty of a leaf with a pencil, the author has endeavored in 

 this attractive volume to repi-esent in outline the most characteristic fea- 

 tures of the leaves of American trees, supplementing his pictures with such 

 descriptions of them, and the trees to which they belong, with their habitat, 

 as has seemed appropriate. Endeavoring to di'aw the leaves exactly as he 

 found them, his two hundred and odd sketches were all taken from Nature, 

 and only sixty of these from pressed specimens which were obtained at the 

 Harvard Botanic Garden. "Yet I have found the world of truth and 

 beauty, as far as leaves are concerned, so limitless that types and rules 

 seemed valuable only as guide-boards are on a strange path." The botan- 

 ical names are given, first from Gray's Field, Forest, and Garden Botany ; 

 second, in conformity with a recent system of nomenclature instituted by 

 Prof. C. S. Sargent. An introduction is contributed by Prof. L. H. Bailey. 

 The sketches begin with a chapter on The Leaf as a Builder, in which 

 the leading features of the endless variety in the forms of leaves are briefly 

 described and illustrated, and the functions of the leaf in the tree's life are 

 explained. The leaves as they are singly brought up are classified as sim- 

 ple alternate, simple opposite, and then as with or without teeth and their 

 edges divided or not divided, compound alternate and compound opposite, 

 and evergreen leaves. Of the genera that are portrayed are the magnolias, 

 tulip tree and sassafras, witch-hazel, sorrel tree, elms, birches, alder, wil- 

 lows, poplars, hawthorns, oaks, dogwood, burning bush, maples, ailantus 

 and locusts, sumach, walnuts, hickories, ash-leaved maple and ashes, horse- 

 chestnuts and buckeyes, pines, spruces, hemlock, fir, larch, and arbor vitae. 

 An intelligible plan for leaf identification occupies one page. A systemat- 



* Familiar Trees and their Leaves. Described and illustrated by F. ScHuyler Mathews. Pp. 320, 

 12mo. New York : D. Appleton & Co. Price, $1.75. 



