NOTES AND COMMENT 



Mr. Humplirey G. Carter, of Cambridge University, has prepared V 



a small volume entitled Genera of British Plants (Cambridge, Univer- 

 sity Press). Its pages contain brief characterizations of the major and 

 minor groups of ferns and flowering plants, with keys to the genera 

 of all families represented in Great Britain. While the book is of 

 limited usefulness to the American botanist, its publication suggests 

 the value that would attach to a similar compendium of the genera of 

 higher plants for the entire United States. Mr. Carter acknowledges 

 his debt to Engler's Syllabus der Pflanzenfamilien (Berlin, Gebriider 

 Borntraeger) , a book of low cost and high utility which should be at 

 the elbow of every botanist. The Syllabus is, in brief, Die Natiirlichen 

 Pflanzenfamilien boiled down to a compass of 250 pages. It charac- 

 terizes the larger groups of the entire vegetable kingdom, down to the 

 families, mentions many important genera and species, and sketches 

 the geographical range of some of the groups. It opens with an essaj^ 

 on the principles of systematic classification, and closes with a conspectus 

 of the phytogeographical regions of the world. A similar book — much 

 fuller in its details, and well illustrated, but limited to the flowering 

 plants — is Warming's Froplanterne (Copenhagen, Gyldendalske Bog- 

 handel) . This volume brings the old Warming-Potter Handbook down 

 to date, but has thus far appeared onl}!- in the Danish language. 



Prof. John M. Coulter read a paper on the Origin of Monocotyledony 

 before the National Academy of Sciences at the meeting in April. He 

 reviewed the investigations which indicate that the Monocotyledons 

 have been derived from the Dicotyledons and described evidence of the 

 manner of this derivation which has been secured through a study of 

 Agapanthus umhellatus, a widely cultivated South African liliaceous 

 plant. In material of Agapanthus which was occasionally dicotyledon- 

 ous it was found that "In every case the cotyledonary apparatus begins 

 as a ring, and continues its growth as one cotyledon or two. It is evi- 

 dent that there is neither suppression of one cotyledon nor fusion of 

 two." 



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