240 REVIEWS. 
dard works illustrative of the flora of.Great Britain. We com- 
mend this new part to the attention of all who are interested in 
Nature, or in the representation of her manifold aspects, and we 
have the assurance that they will be as much gratified with its 
perusal and inspection as we have been. 
We hope the readers of our Journal will tolerate a page or so 
on the general subject of the ‘ Fern Alles,’ a subject which may 
be new to many of them, as the term itself is but of recent 
origin. There does not appear to be any incongruity or unfit- 
ness in the word itself. It is surely preferable to Pteridioides, 
both in sound and sense; it is as fair in its form, and it is more 
congenial to the usages of our language than its Greekified rival. 
We speak habitually of allied genera and allied species, and there 
is no inconsistency in the phraseology “ allied orders.” The orders 
usually included under this term, Fern Allies, are the Horse-tail — 
plants (Hquiseta, the plural of Equisetum), the Club Mosses 
(Lycopodia, the plural of Lycopodium), including the Quillwort 
(Isoetes), the Pillwort (Pil/ularia), and recently the Charas (Cha- 
race), 2 genus or order which, in the systems of our elder bo- 
tanists, occupied a higher rank in the vegetable kingdom than 
that to which they have only very recently been raised; in the 
‘English Flora’ they are placed among the monandrous plants, 
subsequently they were set “ cheek by jowl” with the Alge; they 
are now, for the sake of convenience we suppose, associated with 
the “ Filical Alliance,” as the learned Professor of University 
College terms this group of orders. We admit that there is no 
striking resemblance of external form, nor similarity of organic 
structure, among the individuals composing this group called 
Fern Allies, but they agree in belonging to the vegetable king- 
dom, and coincide in having a less complex vegetable structure, 
and in bearing spores (reproductive bodies not organized like the 
seeds of the more highly developed orders of plants). The term 
Fern Allies does not signify that there is a family likeness be- 
tween them, such as we find in species, genera, and in allied 
orders of cotyledonary plants: in these there is “ facies non om- 
nibus una, nec diversa, tamen quales decet esse sorores;” there 
is a distinction, but not a difference. Inthe Fern Allies there is 
both a difference as well as a distinction, and hence the inappli- 
cability of the term Péeridioides. The order Hquisetacee com- 
prehends only one genus, viz. Hquisetum, and hence the charac- 
