THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 31 



Avell worth reading by even the teaching botanist. Others who 

 still lack a clear conception of how the higher land plants may- 

 have arisen may here find a very attractive account of all phases 

 of the matter. The text covers upward of 350 pages and con- 

 tains numerous illustrations. It is published by Henry Holt 

 & Co., New York, at $1.60 net. 



It is likely that a good many systematic botanists were 

 much surprised a few months ago by the appearance of a new 

 manual of Botany for the north-eastern states bearing the name 

 of an individual practically unknow to the race of species 

 makers. This unexpected volume is entitled "An Illustrated 

 Guide to the Flowering Plants of the Middle Atlantic and New 

 England States," and was put togetlier by Dr. George T. 

 Stevens. Since the descriptions of the species in the region 

 covered must of necessity be pretty much like those in the two 

 other existing manuals of tlie kind, we must judge the present 

 volume upon other grounds. First of all its good qualities, 

 then, must be mentioned the eighteen hundred drawings of 

 plants by the author which serve to make the work attractive 

 to any novice who is too much of a scientist to care to use the 

 "Flow to Know" books and still does not feel himself skillful 

 enough to follow the intricacies of the Brittonian propaganda. 

 These drawings, by the way, are rather more chraacteristic 

 than those that have appeared in the other manuals that lay 

 claim to scientific exactness, and are confined to certain full 

 pages in the body of the book. The descriptions and keys are 

 also for the first time rendered into real Engish and this feat- 

 ure of the w^ork amply bears out the contention so often made 

 that a multiplicity of technical terms are not necessary. In ad- 

 dition to this the first fifty pages of the book are devoted to an 

 outline of structural botany designed to make the identification 

 of plants an easy matter for the student. In arrangement, the 

 book follows the modern sequence and the nomenclature is 

 fairly sane, nor has the author been led away from the facts by 



