62 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



REVIEWS. 



The Early Naturalists : Their Lives and Work (1530-1789). By 

 L. C. Miall, D.Sc, F.R.S. 8vo, pp. xii. 396. Macmillan. 

 10s. net. 

 Most of the advance which the study of nature has made 

 during the last four centuries has unquestionably depended 

 mainly upon the substitution of the examination of plants and 

 animals for that of the descriptions of them handed down from 

 ancient times. The recognition of this fact led to an opposite 

 extreme, and not long ago some biologists spoke and wrote as if 

 determined to ignore their predecessors, believing nothing but 

 what they had themselves examined, and thus obviously wasting 

 much effort in repeating observations already made, and narrowly 

 restricting their own possible achievement. We seem now to 

 be seeking the golden mean, and many disciples of the "new 

 biology " are realizing that — though as Dr. Miall truly remarks 

 in his Preface, " the discoveries, even of great men, have often 

 been vitiated by serious mistakes, which have subsequently been 

 corrected by men of far inferior power" — there were great men 

 in the past, and that, if we wish to advance the cause of science, 

 we cannot afford to ignore the history of their labours. 



We congratulate Dr. Miall upon the thoroughly satisfactory 

 work that he has produced with a view of stimulating a taste 

 for such history. He has, of course, taken the sensible view of 

 " Natural History" as including plants as well as animals, though 

 he owns that his own predilection has led him -to give rather 

 more space to the early entomologists than to others. Unfor- 

 tunately though it is true that " the classics of natural history 

 are not very much studied in our own time," and that " the 

 works of Malpighi, Swammerdam, Ray, Leuwenhoek, and 

 Reaumur are still within the purchasing power of ordinary 

 students," the dictates of fashion have put many of our earlier 

 botanical works in a different category. We are sure that there 

 are scores of students of biology to whom most of the contents 

 of Dr. Miall's book will be new, and we are equally certain that 

 none of them can fail to find his history interesting. 



The book is full of quaint odds and ends from these fascinating 

 bye-paths of nature-lore, though at the same time it affords a 

 consecutive narrative of the progress of biology during two and 

 a half centuriesx Our main complaint of it is that we want 

 more — some missing names, more personal biography, more direct 

 quotations, and more bibliographical detail; but this would of 

 course mean a much larger book, and perhaps, therefore, a smaller 

 audience. We grudge the few pages of introduction, dealing very 

 slightly with the time before Brunfels ; we grudge the space 

 wasted on headings to paragraphs which might have appeared 

 as marginal insets, and we are inclined to grudge Buffon his 

 thirty concluding pages. References are generally given to 

 reprints and to fuller biographies, but Dr. Miall might easily 

 have added a list of authorities ; neither the account of the 



