206 REVIEWS. 



we fiad is a reprint of the first edition, as to the descriptive 

 part. The popular descriptions seem to have hit the mark. 



Mr. Emerson's instructions and appeals for the planting 

 and care of trees, and for the renovation of our woods, wher- 

 ever practicable and profitable, are worthy of all attention, as 

 his efforts in this regard are worthy of all honor. They began 

 long ago, and have been redoubled now in his later years, in 

 this work and elsewhere. The memorial addressed to the 

 President and Congress by the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science he took a large part in preparing ; 

 and his personal furtherance of it at Washington, of which 

 he makes modest mention in the preface, may yet be fruit- 

 ful of benefit. It may not be improper to add that the only 

 permanently endowed arboretum in America — the Arnold 

 Arboretum, entrusted to Harvard University — owes its ex- 

 istence to our author's thoughtfulness and sense of the im- 

 portance of tree-culture. 



DARWIN'S INSECTIVOROUS PLANTS.^ 



This long expected work appeared last autumn, was imme- 

 diately reprinted by the American publishers, and before this 

 time has been so widely read that no detailed account of it is 

 at all necessary. Its main topic is Drosera or Sundew, upon 

 which the vast number and diversity of the observations and 

 experiments — at once simple, sagacious, and telling — which 

 it records, are about as wonderful as the results. As to the 

 latter, it is established beyond question that the common 

 Sundews are efficient fly-catchers ; that the stalked glands, or 

 tentacles as Mr. Darwin terms them, are sensitive and turn 

 inward or even in other required directions in response to 

 irritation ; that they equally respond and move in obedience 

 to a stimulus propagated from a distance through other ten- 

 tacles and across the whole width of the leaf ; that the sensi- 



1 Insectivorous Plants. By Charles Darwin. London and New York, 

 1875. (American Journal of Science and Arts, 3 ser., xi. 69.) 



