NOTICES OF BOOKS. 285 



the Peridinieae of whicli group no very compreliensive account 

 has hitherto appeared in any English textbook. It may even 

 be a surprise to some to find these interesting organisms dealt 

 with at all in a botanical treatise. Yet next to the Diatoms 

 they are the most important " producers " of organic substance 

 in the sea. Professor West claims them as true vegetable 

 organisms with holophytic nutrition. Indeed the distinction 

 between animal and vegetable organisms is so clearly stated in 

 this connection that we venture to quote it : 



" The only sound basis for the discrimination between animal and 

 vegetable organisms is nutrition. It must be borne in mind that all 

 protoplasts, be they animal or vegetable, require practically the same 

 classes of food- substances, and, moreover, they assimilate them in pre- 

 cisely the same way. The vegetable protoplast has, however, acquired 

 the power of constructing its own organic food- substances. In con- 

 trast, therefore, to the animal protoplast, which requires its organic 

 food presented to it in an available and assimilable form, the vegetable 

 protoplast is capable of performing the preliminary synthetic work 

 of constructing complex food- substances from raw materials. This 

 constructive work is carried out in the normal plant by means of 

 chromatophores, and is dependent upon light, and hence the photo- 

 synthetic activity of the typical vegetable organism is its funda- 

 mental characteristic. The raw materials enter the protoplast in a 

 state of solution, and the elaborated materials which are the final 

 products of photosynthetic activity are from the beginning within the 

 protoplast ready for immediate assimilation whenever the action of 

 enzymes renders them thus available. Such nutrition is holophytic. 



" The animal organism, on the other hand, has to take in from the 

 outside elaborated materials insoluble in water, and for the necessary 

 enzyme-action to work efficiently during the assimilation of these 

 substances they must be confined within a space which is more or less 

 limited. Consequently, the normal animal organism has had per- 

 force to adopt a method of ingestion of solid food- substances. This 

 type of nutrition is holozoic.^^ 



The author has devoted most of his investigations to the 

 study of the Green Algae ; the greater part of this work deals 

 with that group and embodies much original research. In a large 

 group containing so many diverse types (the number of known 

 species is probably 5,000) a comprehensive treatment such as 

 was adopted for the Myxophyceae or Peridinieae might have led 

 to confusion in the mind of the student. Hence we have the 

 orders of the Chlorophyceae treated in greater detail. The final 



JouRN. Q. M. C, Series II.— No. 80. 21 



