CURRENT LITERATURE. 
A new laboratory guide. 
Since in these days no teacher of botany finds any entirely satisfac- 
tory helps until he himself writes a text-book or laboratory guide, it is 
not to be wondered at that the schools of pharmacy feel the same 
needs. Although the new book from the laboratory of Professor 
Bastin! is announced for “colleges and other schools,” it is evident 
that its chief purpose is to meet the needs of students of pharmacy 
who have no time to study botany as a science, but must be led directly 
to the essential structures of those plants with which their business 
will have to do. For such students the book will prove to be a very 
useful guide in laboratory work. From the college standpoint, how- 
ever, the usefulness of the book will depend entirely upon the train- 
ing of the teacher. For students well grounded in a general survey of 
the plant kingdom, and in the doctrines of modern morphology, the 
book will be a useful collateral aid in the study of flowering plants. 
We fear that the pendulum has swung too far from the older botany, 
and in our eagerness to show that phanerogams represent only one 
group of plants we are in danger of an almost equally lop-sided culti- 
vation of the lower groups. The phanerogams are still with us, and 
deserve a more careful study than they often recive in the modern 
laboratory. Such studies as Professor Bastin indicates are extremely 
valuable at the end of an elementary course, when the morphology of 
phanerogams has been approached by way of the lower groups and 
their variously modified structures become proper objects of study. 
The general purpose of the book is commendable, and its usefulness 
has been indicated, but in our judgment its usefulness would have 
been much enhanced by making it consistent with the universally ac- 
cepted views of morphology. These views are not any more recondite 
to a beginner than are the older ones, as we have had abundant op- _ 
portunity to know. The plates, especially the flower dissections, — 
are to be criticised from the teacher’s standpoint as encouraging small 
and indistinct sketches, the most persistent fault of the beginner. As 
a matter of personal preference, perhaps, we think that laboratory 
guides should be small and inexpensive and “handy” books, in which 
the typographer’s pride in paper and margins and binding is inappro- 
Bastin, Epson S.—Laboratory exercises in botany, designed for the use of 
colleges and other schools in which botany is taught by laboratory methods. 
°. Pp. 540, plates 87. Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders, 1895. $2.50. 
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