LIFE AND LETTERS OF ALEXANDER GOODMAN MORE. 201 



found, the pictures will form a very good last resort. But we hope 

 that they will only be used apart from the specimens as a last resort. 



Children, before they go to school, have an innate love of 

 natural history. It is all so wonderful. Why do the marguerites 

 disappear and the poppies blaze out in their place, only to be 

 supplanted by something else ? Where do they come from ? Why 

 do they come ? And how many parents trouble to satisfy the little 

 minds ? When they go to school they learn other things, or at 

 best pick to pieces one flower a week and tag the fragments with 

 hard names, and think botany only a trifle less dry than arithmetic 

 or geography. How different this sounds: — ''Let the pupil lie 

 under a dense shade-tree on a summer's day and look up into the 

 dark top. . . . The outside presents a wall of foliage, often so 

 well thatched as to shed the rain like a roof, but the inside is com- 

 paratively bare. . . . The lower leaves have stretched out their 

 stalks in eagerness for the sunlight." The application follows so 

 naturally that the lesson is learnt unconsciously. 



One of the most obvious facts in nature is the great difference in 

 the growth-form of the various kinds of trees and shrubs. Prof. 

 Bailey begins with a lesson on twigs and buds, in which the reason 

 of the differences gradually appears. In the next chapter, or " part," 

 leaves and foliage are studied ; then flowers, fruits, propagation of 

 plants; then behaviour and habits; and, finally, the kinds of 

 plants, including their preservation, and hints on the way to 

 form a herbarium. The book concludes with a useful appendix 

 entitled " Suggestions and Keviews," in which the teacher will 

 find many useful hints, among others, for the arrangement of the 

 school-house and garden. 



As necessarily happens with books intended for use in the eastern 

 United States, some of the plants mentioned are unfamiliar to the 

 English teacher. But there should be no difficulty in finding 

 substitutes, for, as we have already hinted, it is in its method that 

 the great value of the book lies, and any teacher who is worthy the 

 name should be able to adapt it to the surroundings among which 

 he has to teach, and from which he must draw the material which 

 is to be the direct means of imparting the lesson. A "R "R 



Life and Letters of Alexander Goodman More, F.R.S.E., F.L.S., 

 M.R.I.A. ; with Selections from his Zoological and Botanical 

 Writings. Edited by C. B. Moffat, B.A. ; with a preface 

 by Frances M. More. Dublin : Hodges, Figgis & Co. (Ltd.), 

 104, Grafton Street. 8vo, pp. vii, 642. 1898. 



It is rather remarkable how few lives of eminent botanists have 

 been written. Of Professor Babington we possess the volume of 

 letters and records recently reviewed in this Journal ; but of a long 

 line of his contemporaries and predecessors, little is known beyond 

 their published work. Of the lives of Eobert Brown and his 

 successor in the British Museum J. J. Bennett, of George Bentham, 

 J. H. Balfour, Wm. Borrer, J. T. I. Boswell (not to go farther into 

 the alphabet), we have few or no memorials; and this lack seems 



