86 REVIEW. 



Flowering of the Yew, (Taxus baccata.) — I was strolling last March in a valley of the 

 South Downs, called Kingley Vale, about four miles from Chichester, when I was much surprised 

 to see what I supposed to be columns of smoke curling up from among some fine old Yews. 

 My curiosity being aroused to see Avho could be so engaged in so lonely a spot, I neared the 

 place, and my surprise was; certainly not diminished when I found that the appearance was 

 produced by the pollen, from the innumerable flowers with which every sprig was covered. — 

 Idem. 



Agrostographia; A Treatise on the Cultivated Grasses and other Herbage and 

 Forage Plants. By Peter Lawson and Som. Fourth Edition. Edinburgh: 

 Private Press of P. Lawson and Son. 1853. 



This is a well-executed work, containing, in the space of eighty-eight pages, 

 a large amount of valuable information on the varieties and cultivation of 

 herbage plants. We cannot too highly appreciate a work devoted to the 

 spread of accurate scientific knowledge on the subject of agriculture, among 

 a class who have too long looked upon improvement in the light of innovation, 

 and science as less than worthless; and when this information is conveyed in 

 such a form as to be patent to the humblest inquirer, and emanating from 

 a quarter having such an intimate connection with the very parties sought 

 to be enlightened, the effort is doubly enhanced in value. 



The treatise under consideration is divided into three chapters. Chapter 

 one is devoted to a consideration of the history of the introduction and 

 cultivation of species and varieties, and contains the marrow of all that is 

 known of the culture of plants as food for domestic herbivorous animals, from 

 the time of the Egyptians to the present day. Chapter second ^'enumerates 

 the kinds, and specifies the quantity of seed for sowing an imperial acre." 

 This, the most practical part of the whole monograph, contains no less than 

 sixteen tables for sowing all the different varieties of soil, from rich permanent 

 pasture lands to loose drifting sands. The tables, as the preface informs us, 

 are the result of a wide series of experiments and observations, extending 

 over a period of upwards of forty years. The third and last chapter '^describes, 

 in a popular manner, the natural and artificial Grasses." Of the former there 

 are thirty-seven, more or less valuable, and of the latter twenty. We could 

 have wished that a firm carrying with it such authority as P. Lawson and 

 Son, had endeavoured to rectify rather than spread the popular error which 

 calls such plants as the Clovers, Burnet, Lucerne, and Cowslip, artificial 

 Grasses. Grasses they are not; and really we are at a loss to see how any 

 natural product can be correctly termed artificial. This chapter contains two 

 good plates; one the common Poa annua, copied from Dr. Richard Parnell's 

 admirable work on British Grasses, and the other a figure of. the famous 

 Italian Ryegrass, {Lolium Italicum,) introduced by the authors in 1833, and 

 now grown all over the country. 



