156 BOTANICAL GAZETTE. [June, 



of the species has been determined by Mr. Plowright's cultures. The 

 biological notes appended to the description of many of the species are 

 particularly important, and give evidence of the author's careful and 

 extensive research. 



No more need be said for the illustrations than that they are well 

 executed. 



Those familiar with the subject need not be told that this work, 

 owing to the large number of species common to the United States and 

 Great Britain, is almost as serviceable to American botanists as to the 

 English. 



A New Text-book of Botany. 



This is the day of text-books, and an active botanist seems hardly to 

 have done his duty until he has prepared a text-book, a laboratory guide, 

 or at least a scheme for plant analysis. The book before us is a revised 

 and enlarged edition of the "Elements of Botany," recently published by 

 the same author, and contains " organography, vegetable histology, vege- 

 table physiology and vegetable taxonomy, with a brief account of the suc- 

 cession of plants in geologic time, and a glossary of botanical terms." At- 

 tempting, as it does, to cover nearly the whole field of botany, there can 

 be no elaborate discussion. The author has prepared his text with great 

 care, and has brought together in compact shape much that is best in 

 modern botany. If we were inclined to point out defects in this really 

 painstaking book, we would say that the illustrations are not all they 

 might be. Many of them are copies from standard figures, and would 

 have looked better if they had been reproduced by some photographic 

 process rather than redrawn. But this is a minor matter, when the fig- 

 ures are accurate. In the illustration on page 197, however, we have a 

 transverse section of a leaf in which the stomata are shown in surface 

 view, a thing that is apt to be misleading. The book is a useful one and 

 will serve its purpose well. 



Minor Notices. 



Prof. C. S. Sargent has done good service to botanists by editing 

 portions of the journal of Andrd Michaux. It is published by the Amer. 

 Philosophical Society in a pamphlet of 145 pages. The editor acknowl- 

 edges the great assistance rendered by Mr. John H. Redfield, for without 

 it " the publication would never have been begun, and could not have 

 been finished." The journal is more than a diary of travel, for it contains 

 much valuable information concerning the plants discovered, and the 



condition of remote settlements as an intelligent traveler saw them in 

 the last century. 



2 Bastin, EDSONS.-College Botany. 8vo. f pp. xv, 451, with nearly 000 illustrations 

 Chicago: G. P. Engelhard & Co.. 1889. $8.00. 



