200 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



British Wild Flowers in their Natural Haunts described by 

 A. R. Hobwood; with sixty-four plates in colour representing 

 350 different plants from drawings by J. N. Fitch and many 

 illustrations from photographs. Six volumes imperial octavo, 

 cloth boards, each 12s. 6d. net. .Gresham Publishing Company. 

 The publishers have done all in their power to make this hand- 

 some work a success. It is admirably printed, and neatly bound ; 

 the coloured plates are well executed' and accurate, although they 

 convey the impression that Mr. Fitch is better acquainted with 

 pictures of plants than with the plants themselves, and the illustra- 

 tions from photographs of living examples, though sometimes feeble, 

 and not always accurately named — e.g. Delphinium Ajacis (ii. 94) 

 are in the main satisfactory. The weight of the volumes is their 

 only drawback; the first weighs nearly 2\ pounds, and the others are 

 like unto it. 



Had the text risen to the level of the accessories, the book mio-ht 

 have formed a useful addition to the already numerous volumes 

 devoted to the popularisation of British botany; but truth compels 

 us to place it in the category of lost opportunities. As we said when 

 noticing Mr. Horwood's earlier volume The Story of British Plants 

 (1913; see Journ. Bot. 1914, 78) there is still room for that com- 

 panion to the Student's Flora indicated by Sir Joseph Hooker more 

 than fifty years ago in the preface to that work, which should 

 summarise the "physiological and morphological observations on 

 British plants" that even by that time " bad given an impulse and 

 zest to botanical pursuits"; but Mr. Horwood has been content for 

 the most part to follow in the well-beaten track which he had already 

 trodden in the book we have mentioned, as well as in his later 

 volume Practical Field Botany (reviewed in this Journal for 1915). 

 The matter of the work now under notice is to a large extent a 

 repetition of what appeared in those books, and the criticism applied to 

 them in these pages by two different reviewers applies equally to the 

 present volumes, both with regard to matter and manner. As to the 

 latter, the examples quoted from both books are abundantly paralleled 

 in this; it is astonishing that none of ~Nv. Horwood's friends have 

 taken him in band, or that he himself has not profited by the criti- 

 cisms which have been passed upon his style. 



The arrangement of the work is somewhat puzzling. The first 

 volume begins with an ''analytic summary," in which "the essential 

 specific characters of the 347 species described in greater detail, as 

 life-history studies, in vols, ii.-v. are given in technical language." 

 Summaries of the natural orders and genera (these very brief ) appear 

 as appendixes to vol. v. ; while vol. vi. contains "full descriptions of the 

 British species, not described in greater detail in vols, ii.-v.," and 

 also an appendix of plants which "should have been included 'in the 

 text." We fail to see the advantage of this plan over the ordinary 

 systematic arrangement ; even the index does not bring the scattered 

 information together, as neither genera nor orders are included in it. 



The "analytic summary " starts with what is styled an "explana- 

 tion of scientific nomenclature," from which we learn that "Linnseus's 

 greatest work lay in his invention of the binomial system," " bv the 



