FLORAL EVOLUTION 111 



Mr. Wern ham's primary contention is that the GamopetalcB 

 are polyphyletic in origin ; and on this matter the reviewer is in 

 full sympathy with the author. Many botanists have put forward 

 more or less detached suggestions to the same effect ; but none 

 perhaps has stated the case more whole-heartedly. At the same 

 time, the reviewer confesses that some of the particular sugges- 

 tions of afUnities are regarded in the light of the author's warning 

 of their purely tentative nature. 



The work is very readable and very well written, and Mr. 

 Wernham has performed a useful service in drawing the attention 

 of botanists to a department of their science which, in these days 

 of callunetums and heterozygotes, is too apt to be altogether for- 

 gotten. We are bound to confess, however, that the methods of 

 study of floral morphology have not kept pace with the develop- 

 ment of technique in other branches of botany. In early and 

 mid-Victorian days researches on the morphology of the parts of 

 the flower were not unfashionable ; but since the microtome came 

 into vogue there has been a great falling off in work of this 

 character. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that many of the 

 problems discussed in Floral Evolution are incapable of solution 

 without assistance from the microtome and all its concomitant 

 paraphernalia. The reviewer looks forward to the time when 

 problems of floral morphology will once more become a vogue, 

 and when modern methods of research will be applied to this 

 branch of botany, which is at once most interesting and most 

 important from the evolutionary point of view. 



C. E. M. 



BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, dc. 



We are glad to see that the Times is taking up the question 

 of the extermination of primroses near London, and indeed further 

 afield; an article published in its columns for March 13 is followed 

 by a letter from Mr. H. Kowland-Brown, of Harrow Weald, who 

 writes : — " For something over forty years I have watched the 

 annual invasion of the tramp dealer in our woods here, and along 

 the once exquisite Middlesex lanes in which, also, the wild hyacinth 

 flourished abundantly, and the nightingales sang in the high 

 hawthorn hedges. Primroses, hyacinths, high hedges, and night- 

 ingales are now all gone from the lanes, and every Sunday in the 

 season motors bring down troops of indiscriminate ' collectors ' 

 to harry the few remaining beauty spots in the woods left by the 

 itinerant vendors, for whom at least there is some intelligible 

 excuse. I have seen half-a-dozen cars drawn up by the roadside 

 by a tiny copse known from my childhood as 'the Bluebell Place,' 

 and immortalized as such on the canvas of English painters. A 

 few years more, and — the wood being no longer preserved for 

 game — the hyacinths will have followed the primroses; for the 

 most distressing feature of the work of destruction is to be seen 

 upon the road itself strewn with broken spikes of bloom, and bulbs 

 dragged up by the greedy picker, to whom locked gates and thorn 



