OPEN-AIR STUDIES IN BOTANY. 453 



easily accessible papers as those we have cited can have been 

 overlooked, for it can hardly be attributed to any undue haste in 

 the preparation of the Flora of Tropical Africa; and it suggests 

 grave possibilities of similar carelessness with regard to other 

 species, the records of which cannot be so easily checked."^' 



It would seem that the invaluable aid offered by the Index Kew- 

 ensis in matters of synonymy is insufficiently recognized at Kew, for 

 Mr. Baker calls a new species of Inditfofera, I. macra — a name which 

 was published by E. Meyer in 1835 for a South African species. 

 For Mr. Baker's plant, should it prove to be new, we would propose 

 the name /. Di/eri, in commemoration of Dr. Dyer's twenty-five 

 years' connection with the African flora, and of the issue this year 

 of the first volume which has appeared since the editorship was 

 intrusted to him. We notice that a variation in price has been 

 added to the other eccentricities of the Bulletin ; the number for 

 " December, 1896," containing seventy-six pages, costs 4d. ; that 

 for "February and March," with twenty-eight pages, costs 8d. I 



Open- Air Studies in Botany: Sketches of British Wild Flowers in their 

 Homes. By E. Lloyd Pkaeger, B.A., &c. Illustrated by 

 Drawings from Nature by S. Rosamond Pkaeger, and Photo- 

 graphs from Nature by R. Welch. London : C. Griffin & Co. 

 1897. 8vo, pp. xiii, 266 ; 7 plates, 70 figures in text. Price 

 7s. 6d. 



It is not an easy task to write an original book on British wild 

 flowers, but Mr. Lloyd Praeger has succeeded in doing so. In eleven 

 chapters, or "scenes," he takes us through meadow and pasture, 

 by the river and by the sea, over mountain and bog, and even on to 

 a rubbisli-heap ! This division of localities, each one serving as a 

 frame in which to place the flowers which form its characteristics, 

 is of course familiar enough — it is the treatment that is new and 

 unconventional. To begin with, the " scenes" are not imaginary, 

 but actual places — most of them in Ireland — which are named, 

 even the date of the visit being added ; and the plants described 

 are those belonging to the locality. In a perfectly simple and 

 natural way we are introduced to problems connected with the 

 movements and fertilization of plants, the forms and colours of their 

 blossoms (about which it seems to us too much reliance is placed 

 on Mr. Grant Allen's inferences) ; the distribution of seeds and of 

 species ; and tbe thousand-and-one points of interest known to the 

 experienced tield-botanist. From this it will be seen that Mr. 

 Praeger's book is not of the style so painfully familiar, in which 

 quotations at third or fourth hand from "dear old Gerarde" jostle 

 hackneyed scraps of verse, and what is intended to be fine writing 



• Another instance may be noted in the publication of Crassula aloides 

 N. E. Brown (Kew Bull. 1896, 161), based on Rehmann, no. 6375. Not only is 

 there a much earlier C. alooides (in .^(7. Ilort. Kew. i. ii'Jl), which is duly 

 included in tiie Index Kewensis, but I'rof. Schinz published the same Rehmann 

 number as new in Bull. Herb. Boiss. ii. 204 (1894), under the name C. acinaci- 

 formis. 



