NEW PUBLICATIONS. 309 
Vegetable Teratology: an Account of the er Deviations from 
usual Construction of Plants. By MAaxwELL T. MASTERS, 
M.D., F.L.S. With numerous Illustrations xs E M. Williams. 
ion (Ray Society): 1869. . 534. 
4 
An immense quantity of matter relating to the abnormal conditions 
so frequently met with in plants has been written, and Dr. Masters 
has done a good and useful work in concentrating it by a judicious 
selection of those facts ** which seemed sete taser the most important 
or those which are recorded with the most care." He has embodied 
these in the volume d us bis his own numerous observations 
and those of many correspor 
No English work cite re to the subject has been hitherto 
published, with the exception of Thomas Hopkirk’s * Flora Anomala,’ 
a small book printed so long ago as 1817. On the Continent, how- 
ever, several treatises of more importance have appeared, though none 
so comprehensive in scope as the book under notice, which is un- 
doubtedly the best on the subject. One good result which may be 
expected to accrue from its publication is a diminution in the repeated 
descriptions in the journals of well-known malformations—such as 
monstrous forms of Plantain, Cardamine pratensis or Trifolium repens— 
by students and amateurs to whom, as Dr. Masters remarks, Teratology 
* seems always to have presented special attractions " and owes “a 
large number of its records," but who are prone, as a class, to con- 
sider all observations of equal value, whereas as the author shows, 
* the frequency of a particular change in one species . . . may be so 
great as far to exceed the instances of its tisuifestations in all the 
rest put together” (p. 488 
Dr. Masters’s book is eiat a record of facts, and their arrange- 
ment is a matter of some importance. Teratology being defined to be 
“ the history of the irregularities of growth and development, and of 
the causes producing them," the most philosophical mode of grouping 
the various conditions met with would seem to be one depending on 
those causes, a plan Dr. Masters thinks impracticable. This is probably 
true in our present ignoranee of them, and so another method suggests 
itself, viz. according to the organs affected. This arrangement is not 
adopted as it ‘ has only convenience to justify it,” but it may, perhaps, 
be said that in the existing state of knowledge of the subject conve- 
