RECENT BOTANICAL LITERATURE. 
The Cayuga Flora. Part I. A Catalogue of the 
Phenogamia growing without Cultivation in the 
Cayuga Lake Basin. By William R. Dudley. 
Local plant catalogues, as they run, seldom rise to the dig- 
nity of literature. They are commonly mere lists of names, 
useful to people who make exchange of specimens, but other- 
wise of little value. The present Catalogue, being volume two 
of the Bulletin of the Cornell University, is exceptional among 
catalogues in that it merits a place among real books and 
very good books of local botany. The author is one who 
has studied with a zeal and a love, the flora of his district. 
His five and twenty pages placed under the modest title of an 
Introduction, constitute what is perhaps the most admirable 
piece of local’ botanical history hitherto published in America. 
From quoting instructive paragraphs out of the Relations of 
the Jesuit fathers who knew this Cayuga region and wrote . 
about it more than two centuries ago, he passes to the observa- 
tions of John Bartram, who journeyed to those wilds, as they 
then were, in 1743; shows that the immortal Peter Kalm from 
Finland (Abo, or perhaps admissably written Aabo, but not 
* Aobo") penetrated to the same new field a few years after 
Bartram: gives long passages from Pursh's Journal, with the 
original Purshian English all faithfully preserved, relating to 
the Cayuga Lake country : and all these things reveal a certain 
literary taste which scientific writers do not always possess. 
In the catalogue itself one finds recorded all the particular 
localities of the less common and rare species still existing, or 
to be looked for in the region, and more than that, the names, 
stations, dates and collectors' names, of many species obtained 
