NOTES AND COMMENT 275 



vegetation which come near to hand for them. Professor Fink regrets 

 not having had certain pieces of apparatus, notably for the securing of 

 soil samples for moisture determination, but he has secured just as 

 good results by the use of a shovel and tin can, and his example in fore- 

 going an easier but more expensive method is meritorious. The only 

 advice that might be offered on the issue of Professor Fink's work is 

 that anyone who undertakes similar operations should lay out before- 

 hand a very definite plan of action, and first and last he should place 

 only a modicum of reliance on the generalized climatological maps of 

 the Weather Bureau. 



It would require some temerity to plan an addition to the already 

 considerable list of books which treat of the history of the biological 

 sciences. When a man has read so widely among the works of the 

 founders, however, that he is impelled to write about them out of sheer 

 pleasure to himself, that even his literary style has been influenced by 

 that of the old natural histories, the result is sure to be pleasing. These 

 appear to be the circumstances under which Mr. L. C. Miall, of Leftwich, 

 England, has written his The Early Naturalists; Their Lives and Work 

 (Macmillan and Company). In some places the author is too biographi- 

 cal and too brief, but through most of the volume he runs on very inter- 

 estingly, whether talking of the early Greeks or of the middle Eighteenth 

 Century, with which he closes his narrative. Miall has touched even 

 the best known of the founders with a certain freshness, due to his 

 writing more intimately of their personalities and daily lives than most 

 historians have clone, and to his relating more about their religious and 

 political environage than most of us have known. Among the less 

 known men, considerable interest attaches to those who made the first 

 records of the natural history of the distant parts of the earth. In 

 spite of its containing much that is being retold, the volume is an 

 eminently enjoyable one. 



A correspondent who prefers to remain unnamed sends the following 

 information about that which I described in the June issue of The 

 Plant World as the Kellerman plant press. This is in reality the 

 Riker press, for it was invented b}' Riker, whose glass and cotton 

 mounts for flowers and insects are well known. My correspondent 

 advises that the press be filled in this order: (1) corrugated board, (2) 

 blotter, (3) specimen, (4) thin paper the specimen lies upon, (5) a sheet 

 of cotton batting with a thin sheet of paper on each side of it, (6) thin 



