124 
NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
The Miscellaneous Botanical Works of Robert Brown, Esq., D.C. L., F. R.S. 
Edited by John J. Bennett, F.R.S., etc. Vol.I. Ray Society, 1866. 
It is now more than forty years since Nees von Esenbeck published 
the first volume of his German edition of the collected works of Robert 
Brown, and this remains till now the only attempt to bring these 
wonderful memoirs into a compact and consultable form. Even the 
English student has been compelled to consult them in their German 
dress, for the possession of them in English necessitated the acquisition 
of volumes of voyages, travels, transaetions, and journals, octavo, 
quarto, and folio, whieh of themselves would form a considerable 
library. It is surprising that an edition in the language in which they 
were originally published has been so long a desideratum. The Ray 
Society have conferred a great boon on science in supplying this de- 
sideratum, and this boon is greatly enhanced by their having obtained 
the help of Mr. Bennett, so long the intimate friend and colleague of 
Robert Brown, as editor. 
This first volume contains two of the three divisions into which the 
editor has arranged the memoirs, viz. the geographico-botanical and 
the structural and physiological. The systematic memoirs and miscel- 
laneous descriptions of plants are reserved for a second volume, and the 
illustrative plates will be published separately in a large quarto atlas. 
The papers are reprinted from the originals without change, in accord- 
ance with the express desire of their distinguished author. 
The geographico-botanical memoirs consist of the appendices pub- 
lished with the narratives of the expeditions of Flinders and of Sturt to 
Australia, of Salt to Abyssinia, of Tuckey and of Oudney, Denham and 
Clapperton to Africa, and of Ross, Scoresby, and Parvy to the Arctic 
regions, and of the memoir on the-botany of Swan River. The syste- 
matic and physiological memoirs contain the papers on the Parts of 
Fructification in Mosses, on Remarkable Deviations from the usual 
Structure of Seeds and Fruits, on Raflesia and Hydnora, on Kingia, on 
Active Molecules, on the Organs and Mode of Fecundation in Orchidee 
and Aselepiadee, on the Relative Position of the Divisions of Stigma 
.. and Parietal Placentze in the compound Ovarium, on the Plurality and 
> — of the Embryos in the seeds of Conifere, on the Gulf 
"Weed, anc and on oo 
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