242 REVIEWS. 
aquatics and annuals. They are slender, fragile, branched, and 
leafless plants, with their fructification seated in the axils of the 
branches and stem. They are distinguished by an unpleasant 
smell. There are two genera of this Order, Chara and Nitella. 
These plants bear no resemblance whatever to the other plants 
of the Fern Allies; they disagree with all their allies in habit, 
place of growth, aud duration. But they are plants, and so are 
Ferns. ‘“ There is a river in Wales, and there is a river in Mace- 
donia;” ergo, Wales is like Macedonia. The authors of the 
“Hern Allies” have the good sense not to apply the term Pter7- 
dioides to this heterogeneous group of plants. The Charas, if 
they are to have a place at all in British descriptive botanical 
works, must be placed somewhere: and their position after the 
genera usually classed among the Fern Allies is, we believe, as 
appropriate as any other, pace Algologists. If these microscopists 
claim the Charas as belonging to their especial province, we will 
not dispute the point. We have no objection to Mr. Sowerby’s 
proposed arrangement, nor to any other which may be agreed 
upon by those who are most competent to determine, in any 
systematic arrangement, the place which these plants should 
occupy. We only remark that we have seen them at the very 
threshold of our classifications. We have seen books from which 
they were totally discarded. We have seen them again entered 
at the very fag-end of the vegetable kingdom. We hope they 
will at last be suffered to stand in some definite part of our | 
botanical arrangements. 

The Flowering Plants and Ferns of Great Britain: an Attempt 
to classify them according to their Geognostic Relations. A 
Paper read before the British Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science, at the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting, Glas- 
gow, 1855; with Additions. By Joun Gitpert Baker. 
London: Cash, Bishopsgate-street Without. 
One of the chief and distinguishing characteristics of the pre- 
sent age is the progress of science,—the advancement in the 
knowledge of objects, and in the determination of the various 
relations they bear to other different objects. The tract before 
us is one of the many evidences of this spirit of research and 
