CURRENT LITERATURE. 
Pharmacal botany. 
For the student of pharmacy two sciences, chemistry and botany, are 
indispensable. Ot the two, chemistry finds the most continuous ap- 
plication, and as a consequence students of pharmacy are given 
thorough courses in chemistry, pure and applied. But the botany 
has always suffered, and attempts are numerous to produce in the 
form of a text-book or a laboratory guide some short cut to what Is 
considered a sufficient knowledge of botany to enable the student to 
recognize the vegetable drugs. The book before us is a manual of 
organic materia medica: with a prefatory part 1 entitled pharmacal 
botany. It is with this chiefly that we are concerned. 
And we remark at the outset that Prof. Sayre’s introductory section 
is out of date. Why should M. C. Cooke’s quotation from Lankes- 
ter (!) on the distinctions between plants and animals be quoted to 
the extent of half a page when the student is told in a footnote that 
these are of historic interest but is given no real information on the 
differences, or rather the resemblances? 
The first chapter, miscalled morphology, is an illustrated glossary of 
the descriptive terms for phanerogams, among which the gymno- 
sperms figure as a “polycotyledonous” division codrdinate with di- 
and monocots. 
The second chapter, miscalled structural botany, treats of the histol- 
ogy of vascular plants, with special reference, it is said, to the needs 
of the student of pharmacognosy. While the first chapter was an 1n- 
adequate account of the organs of the higher plants, the second 18 
eally ridiculous as an introduction to their histology, illustrated as it 
is with the antiquated—for the year 1895 the grotesque—figures from 
Bentley’s Manual of Botany. The chapter covers 35 pages in all, of 
which 5% are devoted to starches, while the remaining cell contents 
are treated in 3 pages; forms of cells in 1 page; systems of tissues 12 
half a page; and the anatomy of the stem in 2 pages! 
“The cavity left in the cell by its disappearance [‘this protoplasm 
becomes assimilated’] is called a vacuole.” As one method we are 
1Sayre Lucius E.:—A manual of organic materia medica and pharmacog- 
nosy; an introduction to the study of the vegetable kingdom and the vegetable 
and animal drugs, comprising the botanical and physical characteristics, source, 
constituents, and pharmacopceial preparations, with chapters on synthetic or 
ganic remedies, insects injurious to drugs, and ph botany. 8vo. pp-555 
figs. 543. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co., 1895. $4.50. 
82] 
