LOWSON S TEXT-BOOK OF BOTAXY 325 



the present editor, Mr. Sahni, who is Lecturer in the University of 

 Benares, have made the best of it. The chief alterations introduced 

 by the latter are the re-arrangement of the Orders according to 

 Engler's system and a re-casting of the descriptions of the stelar 

 systems in the Pteridophyta. There are defects which are inevitable 

 in an adaptation of a work to another purpose, and which give a 

 greater force of appeal to a work written originally ad hoc. 



Our objections are i-ather to Lowson's original work than to that 

 of his editors. If this is meant for a first book, its beginning, with 

 formal definitions and subdivisions, with pure morphology and his- 

 tology, is certainly not calculated to attract the young student. 

 Again, the sequence of the chapters in Part iii appears to us hope- 

 lessly illogical. Following the anatomy and taxonomy of angio- 

 sperms we have a chapter on Pteridophyta ; then one on Gymnosperms ; 

 a third on Homologies in Angiosperms ; a fourth on Relationship 

 between Vascular Cryptogam and Flowering Plant, followed by one 

 on Ecology! 



A Manual of Elementary Botany for India, by Rai Bahadir K. 

 Ranga Achari, published at Madras in 1916, seems to proceed on a 

 sounder educational method. It begins heuristically by taking two 

 excellent and well-known Indian types, Trihulus terrestris L. and 

 Gynandropsis pentapTiylla L. ; introduces the principles of physiology 

 gradually j9«rr/ ^rtss2^ with the anatomy ; and deals only with promi- 

 nent Orders of Indian angiosperms, without attempting to force upon 

 the beginner a bewilderingly concise summary of the complex variety 

 of the Cryptogamia. Considering the immense area and varied flora 

 of India, it is, perhaps, better that text-book writers should not 

 attempt to provide one book for the whole empire. Writing in 

 Madras, Rai Achari gives Tamil and Telugu equivalents in his Index, 

 while Mrs. Willis and Mr. Sahni give preference to Hindi; stani. In 

 his " Note on Second Edition " the latter dwells on the European 

 facies of the flora of the North-west Himalaya : it would have been 

 instructive to have given instead a brief sketch of the various florulas 

 of which the whole Indian flora is made up — a summary, in fact, of the 

 admirable summary drawn up by Sir Joseph Hooker for the Imperial 

 Gazetteer of India. 



G. S. BOULGEE. 



Gossypium in JPre-Linnean Literature. By H. J. Denham, M.A. 

 Botanical Memoirs No. 2. 8vo, pp. 24. Price 2s. net. Oxford 

 University Press. 



In this interesting pamphlet the author gives a very thorough 

 account of what is known of the early history of the Cotton plant 

 in cultivation. The scheduled list of pre-Linnsean authorities, so 

 far confined to early and little-known writers, includes sixty authors, 

 from Herodotus, Theophrastus and early voyagers, to Fuchsius and 

 Ximenes, Caspar Bauhin, and Linnaeus. It affords an extremely 

 interesting study of the manner in which the story of the races of a 

 plant of greatest economic importance in different parts of the world 



