342 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



illustrated by blocks bori-owed from a great variety of sources, 

 with the result, for instance, that the text of page 91 is continued 

 on page 100. A commendable attempt is made to give the 

 etymologies of all technical terms: but " proteid " is not derived 

 from the Greek "inotos, before." Paragraphs on food as fuel, 

 rations for human dietary, and tables of food values in calories are 

 unusual if not inappropriate in such a work, nor can we under- 

 stand the fetid oil of wintergreen appearing among flavouring 

 essences and "food-adjuncts." This last convenient term was 

 coined, by the way, by Sir Arthur Church in his book on food in 

 1876. "Earth-vegetables" does not strike us as a very happy 

 term for " those garden esculents of which the nutritive part 

 grows in the earth," i. e. tubers, bulbs, &c.; nor do we sympathize 

 with the introduction of such attempted colloquial substitutes for 

 common and not difficult terms, such as " sac-members " for 

 " sporangia," " case-seed class " for " angiosperms," " spore-base 

 fungi" for " basidiomycetes," &c. 



The second half of the book is an introduction to systematic 

 botany. It contains a brief historical chapter; thirty pages 

 devoted to "The Crowfoot Family"; while thirty-two other 

 families of phanerogams ("The Seed-Plant Division") are dealt 

 with in about the same space ; a brief but accurate chapter on 

 " Kinship and Adaptation," including an account of de Vries's 

 mutationism, and an assuredly unnecessary one of the nebular 

 and planetesimal hypotheses ; and life-histories of thirteen classes 

 of cryptogams, from the " Tintball Alga " {Chroococcus) to " Martin's 

 (sic) Selaginella." We object to the transfer of Theophrastus's 

 title of " the Father of Botany " to Linnaeus ; but the most 

 striking feature in this section of the work is the fearsome 

 "plant formulae " which the author has constructed for the genera 

 of phanerogams. Our type does not enable us to reproduce one 

 of these terrible productions, which seem even worse than those 

 employed by Loudon. To the ordinary floral formulae have been 

 added symbols for the duration of the plant's life, leaf-arrange- 

 ment, nervation and composition, the character of the inflorescence, 

 of the floral receptacle, the pericarp and the ovules ! This the 

 writer complacently remarks "it is believed the student will find 

 . . . not only labor-saving but helpful ... as a ready means of 

 comparing . . ." If this is so in America, American students must 

 be very differently constituted in their eyes or their minds from 

 English ones. G. S. Boulgee. 



Loivson's Text-book of Botany: Indian Edition. Adapted by Mrs. 

 J. C. Willis. W. B. CUve. Price Qs. 6d. 602 pp. 8vo. 

 In his preface to this book Dr. J. C. Willis truly says : — " The 

 great failing of the Eastern student is his tendency to learn by 

 rote." For this reason we doubt whether Lowson's Text-book 

 was the best book to adapt for their use. That work, though it 

 has long ago proved itself admirably adapted for the student 

 " cramming " for an examination, is not, we think, so well 

 calculated to provide him with a well-grounded knowledge of his 



