LONDON TREES 81 



Having thus considered the trees separately, Mr. Webster pro- 

 ceeds to group them under the headings of parks, squares, gardens, 

 open spaces, streets and churchyards, as to all of which his knowledge 

 is "extensive and peculiar." The book concludes with "a handy 

 reference guide to where some of the largest London trees are 

 growing" and has an excellent index: it is very well printed, and in 

 every way attractive. 



Elementary Notes on Cjnifers. By A. H. Church, M.A. Oxford 



Botanical Memoirs, No. 8, pp. 32. Oxford University Press, 



192o. Price 2s. net. 

 Form-factors in Goniferae. By A. H. Church, M.A. Oxford 



Botanical Memoirs, No. 0, pp. 28. Oxford University Press, 



1920. Price 2s. net, 



The teachers of various subjects in our universities seem to have 

 come to the conclusion that, in the interests of the rapid acquisition of 

 thorough knowledge, it is better for them to provide their students 

 with lecture-notes than to leave the preparation of such notes to the 

 students themselves. These modern lecture-notes are very different 

 from those "analyses" or "aids" provided for the students of a 

 former generation. The latter were essentially " cram " books for the 

 lazy student desirous of obtaining the minimum knowledge necessary 

 for a "pass " degree : the modern notes, such as the excellent series — 

 not, we hope, completed — which Mr. Church prepares for the Forestry 

 students at Oxford, demand the most active mental exercise of the 

 intellectual athlete. The one class of books bears much the same 

 relation to the other as a basin of weak beef -tea does to a solid lump 

 of meat-extract. It is most useful for students outside his own 

 university that Mr. Church his by their publication placed his 

 thorough treatment of the subject within their reach. In these days 

 of costly paper and printing we realise the advantageous conciseness 

 of technical terminology ; but a professor of botairy, even at Oxford, 

 is hardly expected now-a-days to be a supporter of " compulsory 

 Creek," which Mr. Church's language practically shows him to be. 

 Some Oxford men who remember Freeman's Old English History, 

 for example, will regret the necessity — if it exists — for the use of 

 language of which Mr. Church's opening sentence is a moderate 

 example : the description of a land flora begins by stating it " as 

 constituting the autotrophic vegetation of subaerial environment 

 (behind the horizon of saprophytic phyla of Fungi), expresses the 

 progression of plant-life from the medium of water to that of 

 atmosphere." Such language painfully suggests the description of 

 a man of science as " one as calls an 'ole a horifice." 



The thoroughness and judgement of Mr. Church's work is shown, 

 perhaps, as much in his plan as in the details of its treatment. He 

 has apparently to give a course of from ten to fifteen lectures to 

 students intending to become forest officers, who have had two or 

 three terms' previous work of the same extent in elementary structural 

 botany, the reproduction of angiosperms, and, perhaps, the morphology 

 of fungi — a group of extreme practical importance to the forester. 

 Of fifteen lectures — all of which are, of course, accompanied bv prac- 



