150 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



due. This appears to be the case with the third volume of 

 the Pocket Garden Library, published by Doubleday Page 

 & Co., which is labelled "Garden Flowers of Autumn". We 

 have never seen a book that contained as many errors in a 

 similar number of pages. To begin with, the book is not 

 representative of its subject, since the strictly autumn-Bow- 

 ers are not selected. Such typically spring-flowering spe- 

 cies are barberry, spicebush, pyrethrum, bugbane, flower- 

 ing dogwood, burning bush, privet, magnolia and ninebark 

 appear in the list. Nor are the colored representations of 

 the flowers any better. The heath aster is colored a deep 

 blue, the ninebark is bright red, the gingko has yellow leaves 

 and a twig bare of leaves, flowers, or fruit is labelled dog- 

 wood. It is no exaggeration to say that manyof the illustra- 

 tions are inferior in coloring to similar work produced in 

 any good grammar school. Of the smoke bush, w r e learn 

 that the flowers are purple, and the rudbeckia appears as 

 cornflower instead of cone-flower. The publishers intimate 

 that they have sold more than 300,000 copies of this set. 

 Perhaps they have; we paid $1.00 for the review copy here 

 mentioned. 



The strawberry is about as widely distributed as any 

 single genus could well be, since it grows from Lapland and 

 the Shetland Islands to Spain, Sicily, and Greece and across 

 Asia north of the 60th parallel of latitude as well as in the 

 western hemisphere from Alaska pretty nearly to Cape 

 Horn. Three of the four types from which the cultivated 

 berries have sprung — Fragaria Virginica, F. Chitocnsis and 

 F. Vesca — grow wild in America, the first being the common 

 wild strawberry of eastern America and the last its Euro- 

 pean counterpart which has become naturalized on this side 

 of the world. From these, and from Fragaria elatior, a 

 species of central Europe, have sprung a vast number of 

 named varieties, 1,879 of them being of American origin. 



