THE BRITISH MYCOLOGICAL SOCIETY TRANSACTIONS 213 



volved considerable research ; but Mrs. Rea's style, as may be 

 gathered from the sentence quoted above, leaves a good deal to 

 be desired : it is to be regretted that her paper was not submitted 

 to a friendly critic before it was sent to press, as it would be 

 greatly improved by condensation : much that comes quite 

 naturally in a spoken address is out of place in a permanent record. 



The critical remarks on various authors, while doubtless 

 conveying (though at times somewhat obscurely) Mrs. Rea's 

 estimate of their work, are, we think, themselves open to criti- 

 cism : she hardly shows the impartiality which one expects from 

 a critic when she says of M, Boudier's Icones : " They are simply 

 magnificent, and I speak more feelingly of them because their 

 author is our friend, and the reproductions, though good, are not 

 a tithe of the originals " — the ambiguity of the last remark is 

 characteristic of Mrs. Rea's style. She seems imperfectly ac- 

 quainted with Mr. Worthington Smith's work, as no reference is 

 made to the two sheets representing respectively edible and 

 poisonous fungi, published many years since by Hardwicke, nor 

 to figures in the volume on " Eatable Funguses " (itself omitted 

 by Mrs. Rea) edited by R. Hogg and G. W. Johnson in 1866, to 

 which Mr. Smith contributed the figures. Her appreciation of 

 the admirable series of original drawings in the public gallery 

 of the Department of Botany seems to us very inadequate : 

 " they suggest to my mind," she says, " a compilation, and not 

 what we see in the field," but we believe that practically all were 

 drawn from living specimens. 



The typography of the Transactions is good, but its arrange- 

 ment is open to improvement — e. g. the title of a book should be 

 printed either in italics or in quotes, to distinguish it from the 

 text, and the very black headings to the papers and in the list of 

 Phycomycetes are unpleasing ; the wrapper-title-page is very ugly. 

 The pages have no headings — it is strange that what almost 

 seems a providential arrangement for facilitating reference should 

 be overlooked — but in this respect Mr. Rea may cite the example 

 of the Kew Bulletin, which from the first has ignored this aid to 

 consultation. The printing is on the whole accurate and highly 

 creditable to a firm presumably not accustomed to undertake 

 scientific work ; there are however errors, the funniest of which 

 is " fakirs " for " fakers," for which we are sure Mr. W. G. Smith, 

 wdio is quoted as having used the term, is not responsible. 



The volume as a whole is highly creditable to the Society, 

 and shows a gratifying advance in the study of groups of plants 

 which have in the past been somewhat neglected. 



BOOK-NOTES, NEWS, etc. 

 At the meeting of the Linnean Society on June 1st, Mr. James 

 Groves gave a demonstration of " New Types of Fossil Characeae 

 from the Purbeck Beds." He referred to the curiously isolated 

 character of the Characece, which exhibit no clear affinities with 

 any other group of plants, and to the consequent interest attaching 

 to any light which could be thrown on their past history. After 



