104 Bibliographical Notices. 
beaten isles where garefowl probably breed” is delusive, for there 
is not one authenticated instance of the occurrence of this species 
within—or even very close to—that line. We think it unnecessary 
to point out further errors. 
A Handbook of Cryptogamic Botany. By A. W. Brynert, M.A., 
B.Se., F.L.S., and G. M. Murray, F.L.S. With 378 Illustrations. 
London and New York: Longmans, 1889. 8yvo. Pp. 473. 
Ir is now above thirty years since Berkeley’s ‘Introduction to 
Cryptogamic Botany’ was published, and in that time an enormous 
advance has been made in added genera and species in all the orders 
and in our knowledge of the complicated life-histories of many of 
the lower types. It is remarkable that during so long a period of 
active work, in which the number of teachers and students has been 
so greatly multiplied, that no other work of a similar scope has been 
written in the English language. Partly, no doubt, this has arisen 
from the circumstance that in the teaching at our universities and 
medical schools Cryptogamic Botany gets pushed into a small corner, 
and partly because the field of study is so vast that it has now got 
specialized into several different departments ; so that our fern-men 
know very little about fungi and our algologists about mosses. 
Mr. Bennett has specially worked at Alge, and in the present 
volume he has also undertaken the vascular orders and the Mus- 
cine, whilst Mr. Murray has dealt with the Fungi, including the 
Lichens, Mycetozoa, and Bacteria. What they have attempted is 
not to deal nearly so much as Berkeley did with tribes or even 
genera in detail, but to give a general summary of the life-history 
of the leading types of form, such as might be suitable for the use 
of teachers and advanced students. The book is copiously illus- 
trated by woodcuts interspersed in the text, the figures being to a 
large extent borrowed from recent German handbooks, such as those 
of De Bary, Sachs, Schenck, Luerssen, and Thomé. Following the 
example of the last edition of Huxley and Martin’s ‘ Elementary 
Biology,’ they make use of a descending in preference to an ascending 
order as regards complication of structure. The series of orders is 
classified out under seven primary subdivisions as follows :—First 
the Vascular Cryptogamia. Here the orders are grouped under a 
heterosporous and isosporous series, Ophioglossaceze being treated 
as a class distinct from Filices. A useful chapter, founded mainly 
on Solms-Laubach’s recent ‘ Handbook of Vegetable Paleontology,’ 
is added, upon the fossil types, which, in Equisetaceze, Lycopodiacee, 
and Selaginellacez are arborescent and extremely different from 
anything in existence at present. The second subdivision deals with 
the Muscinew, separating them into Musci and Hepatice. A better 
subdivision of the Musci would be to keep up Archidium alone as 
a distinct order, for the other genera here associated with it, Phas- 
cum, Ephemerum, and Bruchia, are now by all the best authorities 
classified with the Bryacee, and Pleuridium, as the figure given 
(fig. 122) shows, has the calyptra separated as a distinct cap. The 
