458 A TEXT-BOOK OF GENERAL BOTANY. 



A Text-book of General Botany. By Carlton 0. Curtis, A.M., 

 Ph.D., Tutor iu Botany in Columbia University. New York 

 and London : Longmans, Green & Co. 



The present age is verily one of text-books, some bad, very few 

 good, and the vast proportion merely mediocre. There are many 

 points in Dr. Curtis' s book which raise it above the dead level of 

 the ordinary productions of its class; its plan is good, the insistence 

 on, and directions for, laboratory practice are admirable, and the 

 numerous illustrations are for the most part excellent. 



In the preface the author expressly states that the book is 

 intended to be used in conjunction with lectures, and this forestalls 

 a criticism which would naturally occur to anyone glancing over 

 its pages, viz. that a considerable range of knowledge on the part 

 of the student is taken for granted — much more indeed than the 

 character of the book would appear at first sight to warrant. 



We have come across some misleading statements here and 

 there. Thus Robert Hooke did not, at any rate at first, discover 

 his cells in charcoal, but in bottle cork ; it was not to Von Mohl, 

 but to Cohn Briicke and M. Schultze, that we are indebted for the 

 recognition of the identity and importance of protoplasm in both 

 animals and plants. To Von Mohl, it is true, belongs the credit 

 of having first recognised in plants the formative nature of proto- 

 plasm, but the name had been used some years before by Purkinje. 

 It is not, we think, desirable to ticket off so important a discovery 

 as that of the existence and significance of protoplasm (as is so 

 often done) under "Von Mohl, 1816." Like ail other great dis- 

 coveries, it was the work of many investigators; and others, e.g. 

 Du Jardin, had already before 1816 apprehended its nature amongst 

 animals in the substance he termed sarcode. And the plea for a 

 more adequate treatment of this particular discovery may be the 

 more reasonably urged inasmuch as the main threads are compara- 

 tively easy to trace, and the student is furnished with an admirable 

 example of the origin and growth of a scientific discovery, the 

 importance of which it is hardly possible to exaggerate. On the 

 whole, we are not much impressed with the chapter on the cell. 

 It seems to have been compiled iu rather a hurry, and the some- 

 what frequent misprints (not always the fault of the printer) point 

 in the same direction. 



It is a matter for regret that in this, as in so many modern 

 text-books, the external morphology of the plant meets with such 

 scanty recognition. The student is invited to a feast of pickles and 

 physiology — very good in their way — whilst he is allowed to neglect 

 the weighty matters of habit, adaptation, and variation of plants. 

 And this in spite of the truth that it is in the philosophy of form 

 that one can often read most clearly the reason of that minute 

 internal structure so dear to the heart of the microscopist. 



The systematic part of the book occupies about three-quarters 

 of the whole. It is this portion which especially requires extensive 

 subsidies at the hands of the teacher. The Floridem, for example, 

 cannot possibly be treated intelligibly within a space of six pages, 

 even when illustrated by several excellent figures. 



