26 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



A Text-Book of Botany. By Drs. Eduard Strasburger, Ludwig 

 Jost, Heinrich Schenck, and George Karsten. Fourth 

 English Edition, revised with the Tenth German Edition by 

 Professor W. H. Lang. With 782 illustrations, in part 

 coloured. Pp. xi, 767. Macmillan & Co. Price 18s. net. 



The University student making botany a chief subject for his 

 degree must realize that the subject is too wide to be adequately 

 dealt with by one author or in a single volume. There are, how- 

 ever, many other students, such as those of our medical and 

 pharmaceutical schools, or even of the more advanced classes in 

 general secondary schools and polytechnics, who do undoubtedly 

 demand a single volume giving a comprehensive view of the 

 science — or) at least, of its main divisions, anatomy, and physio- 

 logy. It is far better that they should have this from the hands 

 of eminent original workers than from even the best of mere 

 compilers of other men's labours ; and, during the last decade, at 

 least, the volume familiarly known as " Strasburger" has, by very 

 general consent, been recognised as filling this place. That its 

 bulk has increased from 632 pages in the first translated edition 

 to 767 in the present one, is merely the inevitable growth with the 

 advance of the science; but it has undergone many other im- 

 portant changes in addition to this expansion. The student has 

 from the first had in his " Strasburger" the advantage of the co- 

 operation of four distinguished German scholars, Strasburger's 

 own contribution occupying only about a quarter of the book, and 

 the Cryptogamia being described by Professor Schenck. In the 

 first edition, that of 1898, these two botanists had as their 

 associates Dr. Fritz Noll and Dr. A. F. W. Schimper, and there 

 was nothing on the face of the work to indicate the share which 

 each of these four authors had in it. The present edition contains 

 a new section on Physiology by Professor Jost, and one on the 

 Phanerogamia by Professor Karsten. This means that the larger 

 half of the book is new, which fact, coupled with other extensive 

 changes, fully justifies Professor Lang in omitting the name of the 

 original American translator from the title-page. We are, how- 

 ever, still left to gather the respective responsibilities of the 

 authors from the headings of the "Index of Literature" now 

 added at the end of the work. 



We have always thought "Strasburger" a most remarkable 

 work, as emanating from German universities, in its freedom 

 from the national verbiage. The student may well be grateful 

 to find here, from the hands of the much deplored master, the 

 essentials of histology, without being burdened, for instance, with 

 the controversial details of a stelar theory ; while nothing can 

 well be more masterly than the notes on methods which in 

 Strasburger's section are relegated to " lower case." Mitosis — 

 under its longer name, karyokinesis — necessarily becomes promi- 

 nent, for the distinction between "ordinary" and "reduction" 

 divisions of the nucleus, or the " haploid " and " diploid " phase, 

 underlies much of the work, much as did the distinction between 



