48 The Plant World. 



the most critical of students, at the same time its breadth is such 

 that it is highly profitable to all classes and conditions of bot- 

 anists. — Howard S. Reed. 



Botany and Pharmacognosy. — Botanists appear rather 

 generally to have forgotten that an important portion of their 

 science is comprised in the subject of pharmacognosy. At the 

 present time the application of botany to agriculture is em- 

 phasized in almost every botanical department, especially with 

 regard to that portion of mycology which has somewhat gratui- 

 tously received the name of plant pathology, and in the new 

 science of plant breeding, but there are comparatively few Amer- 

 ican university laboratories in which the student ever receives 

 the suggestion that one of the important fields of applied botany 

 and one that is destined to reward research with far-reaching 

 results, is that which deals with the properties and behavior 

 of the drug-producing plants. Just as a physiogical plant path- 

 ology and a physiological study of plant inheritance promise 

 much more for the future than the morphological or statistical 

 studies that have heretofore prevailed in these lines, so a physio- 

 logical study of the nature, occurrence and formation of the 

 chemical compounds of plants promises amply to reward re- 

 search and to become one of the legitimate and important 

 branches of botanical work. 



Readers who agree with the writer in this matter will 

 welcome Kraemer's new edition of his text-book of Botany and 

 Pharmacognosy, which has recently appeared. * While the 

 book could hardly serve as an introductory text for students 

 other than those of pharmacognosy as such, it should neverthe- 

 less appeal to the general botanist and especially to the physiol- 

 ogist as a reference book of great value. 



After a general treatment of the main characters of the 

 principal groups of plants and of the "outer" and "inner" mor- 

 phology of the higher forms, the last two chapters of Part I deal 

 with the "Classification of the Angiosperms yielding Vegetable 

 Drugs," and with the;" Cultivation of Medicinal Plants." Inter- 

 esting treatments of typical drug plants make up a large part of 

 the former of these two chapters, while the latter one considers 

 the propogation of medicinal plants and the collection, curing, 



*Kraemer, Henry. A Text-Book of Botany and Pharmacognosy. Pp. 888. Philadelphia 

 J. B. Lippincott Co.. 1910. ($5.00). 



