January i i, 190^] 



NA TURE 



243 



cotton, the development of a potato relatively immune 

 to fungous diseases, an increased production of fruit 

 or the introduction of hardier varieties, of some that 

 are rarlier, of others that are later, to say nothing 

 of the improvement of flowers in form, colour, and 

 perfume, are all points of great importance and of 

 very great interest from a biological point of view. 



In this field of work Mr. Burbank has long been 

 known as an energetic labourer, and it is quite pos- 

 sible that in actual amount his work bulks larger than 

 that of anv of his predecessors or his contemporaries. 

 Moreover, as we learn from the book before us, 

 and from other sources, the experimenter is a man 

 of high purpose, modest, and amiable. It is for these 

 personal reasons we imagine that he will have cause 

 to regret the appearance of this volume. We have 

 no desire to belittle Mr. Burbank or to undervalue the 

 importance of what he has accomplished. We believe 

 that he would be the first to acknowledge that there 

 existed strong men previous to the appearance ol 

 Agamemnon. But this is a fact that his eulogist does 

 not sufficiently estimate. In perusing the glowing 

 paragraphs of this volume the casual reader might 

 imagine that there were no plant-breeders before 

 Burbank, or that their labours were comparatively 

 insignificant, and vet in our own country alone we 

 seem to have heard of Thomas Andrew Knight, of 

 Dean Herbert, of Trevor Clarke, of Thomas Rivers, 

 of John Laing, of Dominy, of Seden, of Laxton, and 

 of a large number of others whose productions at 

 least vie in importance with those of the American 

 experimenter, whilst a visit to the great establish- 

 ments of Vilmorin, near Paris, Benary, and others at 

 Erfurt and Quedlinburg, as well as to the trial- 

 grounds of our Yeitchs, Suttons, Carters, and many 

 others, would show that the great American hybridist 

 is by no means without a rival in his line of wink. 



It would hardly be fair to criticise those products 

 of Mr. Burbank 's skill and perseverance that have 

 reached us, because it may well be that they are not 

 yel adapted to our climate. At any rate, to name only 

 a few instances, the Burbank plum, the Burbank lily, 

 the Shasta daisy, all so enthusiastically spoken of in 

 ili. pages of this book and elsewhere, have not, in 

 this country, justified the encomiums passed upon 

 them by the American Press. 



When we read of Mr. Burbank 's methods of work 

 we do not find anything different from the practices 

 of our "raisers." who are too modest to speak of 

 their efforts as "creations." 



Among the " creations " mentioned in this volume 

 is the " thornlcss edible cactus." Surely we have 

 heard of and seen a spineless Opuntia before atten- 

 tion was called to it in this volume, where it is stated 

 that " nothing more marvellous has ever been done 

 in plant-life " ! 



Again, "the rare effects developed in the trans- 

 formation of the columbine " do not differ (so far as 

 we can tell from the illustration facing p. 359) from 

 the stellate columbine known in our gardens for cen- 

 turies and figured on p. 273 of Parkinson's Paradisus 

 (1629;. 



A man who has experimented on such a colossal 

 NO T889, VOL. 73] 



scale for so long a time might be expected to have 

 gathered valuable information on such points as 

 heredity, adaptation, inheritance of acquired char- 

 acters, as well as formed opinions on Mendelism and 

 mutation. We gather from the book before us that 

 Mr. Burbank's attention has, almost of necessity, been 

 directed to these subjects, and we earnestly hope that 

 now that the Carnegie Institution has granted him 

 a subvention of ten thousand dollars a year for ten 

 years he will find time to record and coordinate hi- 

 experiments for the benefit of future workers and the 

 increase of biological knowledge. 



Incidentally, we glean that Mr. Burbank is not 

 inclined to accept the views of YVeismann or of 

 Mendel, but that he looks favourably on the mutation 

 theory of De Yrics. Surely no practitioner has had 

 better opportunities of judging of these matters than 

 has Mr. Burbank, and if he will give us his own 

 experiences in his own words, rather than in those 

 ol some too partial biographer, the world will be 

 the gainer, and the value of Mr. Burbank's work 

 more accurately gauged than it can be from the 

 perusal of the present volume. 



CHEMICAL TECHNOLOGY. 

 Chemische Technologie. By Dr. Fr. Heusler. Pp. 



xv ' + 35°- (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1905.) Price 



8 marks. 

 T'HE author states in tin- preface that the work is 

 *- intended for the use of merchants. This at 

 once opens up the question whether a book of this 

 kind, ostensibly written for non-chemists, can fulfil 

 its object. The author is under the impression that 

 a merchant has acquired, in the course of his secon- 

 dare education, sufficient knowledge to read and in- 

 terpret chemical equations, and he adopts in his work 

 chemical symbols throughout, in the belief that it 

 would be almost an insult to the German merchant 

 to think him incapable of understanding chemical 

 equations. 



The reviewer cannot agree with this opinion in its 

 broad generality-. His own experience would lead him 

 to confirm in this respect the truth of the trite old 

 saying, " A little knowledge is a dangerous know- 

 ledge." When the commercial director of a chemical 

 works asks his chemist, in times of stress, to use a 

 sulphuric acid of 50 Be instead of 66° Be on the 

 score that the former is so much cheaper for tin same 

 amount of sulphuric acid, or when the chief clerk 

 struts through the works meddling with the chemistry 

 of the business, then the chemist would certainly 

 prefer the English system of subdividing the work. 

 Of course, there are merchants who are fully able to 

 understand purely chemical questions, but such mer- 

 chants would certainly have recourse to the extensive 

 manuals on their own specialities rather than studv 

 tin' present w-ork, in which the information on every 

 subject must neeess.irih be very meagre. 



From this point of view the book is not within the 

 horizon of the average chemical merchant. The 

 tendency to explain the subject so far as possible by 

 equations necessarily lead> to a twisted and some- 

 times wrong representation, as these may be read to 



