NEW PUBLICATIONS. 281 



The Botanical Text Book : By Asa Gray, M. D., Fisher Professor of Natural 

 History in Harvard University. Second edition, 1845. 



Tins work is a volume of five hundred pages. The first edition was 

 excellent, and the second is a great improvement. It is illustrated 

 by more than one thousand tuoodcuts, which enable the student 

 readily to apprehend the delicate points of structural and systematic 

 botany. It maintains the doctrines of the Natural System, with great 

 clearness, beauty and power. 



It is ever interesting to trace the progress of science. That which 

 has any just claims upon the regards of men, goes onward in its 

 useful course. That which is fanciful, hypothetical, or useless, 

 sinks away and is forgotten. Linnasus, who is regarded as the 

 father of scientific botany, died in 1778. It was in 1751, that he 

 published his Philosophia Botanica, which contained the principles 

 of a philosophic study of the vegetable kingdom. The incorporation 

 of this work in Rose's Elements of Botany, which was published 

 in London in 1775, greatly extended these principles. This was an 

 era for botany in England. In 1753, Linnaeus published his Species 

 Plantarum, being an " accurate and complete digest of botanical 

 knowledge" at that time, containing more elegant and precise de- 

 scriptions, under a greatly improved form, than had ever appeared, 

 and embracing all the then known species, being between seven and 

 eight thousand : at this hour, the number of described plants is 

 estimated at one hundred thousand, and the genera near seven thou- 

 sand ; and the Species Plantarum, in the hands of the successors 

 of Linnasus, has become a huge work of several volumes. 



In 1807, Sir James Edward Smith, so long the distinguished 

 President of the Linnasan Society in England, published his " In- 

 troduction to Physiological and Systematic Botany," a work which 

 at once became the text book and standard authority of botany in 

 that country. This work was republished, from its second edition, at 

 Boston, in 1814, with Notes by J. Bigelow, M. D., who has for a 

 long time been ardently engaged in the pursuits of botany in that 

 part of our country. This republication was an era in our country 

 in botanical science ; and yet at what a vast remove from the phi- 

 losophy of botany, as presented in the Botanical Text Book, is this 

 work. It is read with interest at this time for its knowledge, but 

 evidently belongs to another age, even to the dark ages of botany. 



