354 FLORA AMERICA BOREALI-ORIENTALIS. 
Germany, which has given a sad blow to the pursuit of natural his- 
tory in that country. 
'The work of Messrs. Gray and Sprague appears under much better 
auspices. We have heard that it is liberally aided by the local 
government; and we are confident that it will receive from the public 
in this country, as well as in America, that further support, without 
which an original work of the kind cannot be continued, and that in 
the course of afew years we may see it brought successfully to its 
conclusion. 
In regard to the plates, the great merit both of the American and of 
the German works is their originality: the drawings and analyses are 
in almost all, if not in every instance, taken from specimens either 
fresh or dried, and not copied from others. In both, the plates are 
executed in line-engraving on lithographic stone,* an art admirably 
suited for representing analytical details with clearness and accuracy, 
without the great expense of engraving on metal. It was first practised 
at Munich, many years ago, and is, perhaps, best known to our 
botanists by Martius’s splendid botanical illustrations, and from Munich 
it has been carried out to America by Mr. Presteb. In England it is 
but little, if at all exercised; either because of the expense of the 
stone itself, or on account of the loss and difficulty experienced in re- 
placing any established process by a new one, whatever be its intrinsic 
advantages. 
In comparing the execution of the two works we cannot refrain from 
quoting the following impartial criticism of a distinguished German 
botanist in Mohl and Schlechtendahl’s * Botanische Zeitung.’ ** The two 
works differ in this, that the German one, with a more fragmentary 
general representation of the plant, gives a greater number of partial 
analyses, and thus, as it appears to us, crowds them too much on the 
plate; whilst the North American one gives a more complete figure of 
the species, and analyses only of the most important characteristic 
organs, by which means, as well as by better paper and impression, 
the plates gain much in elegance, clearness, and synoptical representa- 
tion of the plant ; more especially as, wherever the single octavo plate 
has been insufficient sa i proper illustration, a double plate, or two 
separate plates are give: 
ere is one point which appears to us to have been generally at- 
* Not on steel, as is stated by mistake in our first notice of the work. 
