REVIEWS 689 



responding section at the end of the book, several papers may stand to the 

 credit of the author in question. Much annoyance and time would have 

 been saved by numbering the references, and inserting such numbers in the 

 text after the name of the author. 



P. H. 



The Preparation of Organic Compounds. By E. De Barry Barnett, B.Sc, 

 A. I.C. [Pp. xvi 4- 273, with 54 illustrations.] Second Edition. 

 (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1920. Price 10s. 6d. net.) 



This book, which is now in its second edition, aims at " giving a general 

 outline of the methods actually employed in preparing organic compounds, 

 and thus providing not only a laboratory manual, but also a book which 

 may be used as a companion volume to the usual theoretical text-books." 

 The first chapter is devoted to a description of apparatus and methods of 

 manipulation, and contains some quite useful hints on the adaptation of 

 ordinary culinary vessels to fairly large-scale chemical operations ; it also 

 gives an account of the ordinary equipment of an organic chemical laboratory, 

 accompanied, however, by some positively grotesque illustrations in which 

 no attention whatever is paid to proportions or details ; the Soxhlet apparatus 

 on page 20 in particular being quite incapable of acting as it stands. The 

 remaining twelve chapters each deal with the methods of preparation of a 

 special group of organic compounds such as hydrocarbons, halogen com- 

 pounds, alcohols, phenols and mercaptans, aldehydes, ketones and quinones, 

 carboxylic acids, esters, nitriles, nitroso and nitro compounds, etc., etc. 

 As stated in the Preface, the description of the processes given is less full 

 than in most books on organic preparations, but the details given are sufficient 

 to enable the average student to carry out the preparations successfully. 

 This may be true in many cases, but very frequently the preparations start 

 from a compound which is not an ordinary laboratory chemical, while no 

 method of preparing this compound is given elsewhere in the book. This 

 method of writing may be excusable in a large book of reference such as 

 Weyl's Methoden der Organischen Chemie, to which the author expresses his 

 indebtedness, but is hardly suitable for a laboratory manual such as the 

 present volume. 



Again, it is a little difficult to understand why the old-fashioned method 

 of preparing formic acid from glycerol is quoted as an example of the pre- 

 paration of a carboxylic acid by oxidation of an alcohol, and also why the 

 modern method of preparing oxalic acid from formic acid and the catalytic 

 preparation of acetone from acetic acid receive no mention. 



The book is fairly well supplied with references, but unfortunately no 

 dates are given, which fact of course very considerably detracts from their 

 value. 



When allowance has been made for these minor defects, however, it must 

 be acknowledged that the book contains quite a lot of useful information. 



P. H. 



BOTANY AND AGRICULTURE 



The Hardwoods of Australia and their Economics. By Richard T. Baker, 

 Lecturer on Forestry, Sydney University. [Pp. xvi + 522, with 134 

 coloured plates and 192 figures in black and white.] (Department of 

 Education, Sydney. Price £1 5s.) 



The Australian continent is one of the greatest hardwood-producing areas 

 in the world. It possesses probably somewhere about 500 species of dico- 

 tyledonous timber-trees which, though a low number considering the area 



