December 31, 1908] 



NA TURE 



245 



contain summaries of those detailed accounts of 

 families and species, injurious or useful to man and 

 hi-, domesticated plants and animals, at present to be 

 found only in scattered oritjinal papers or in expensive 

 advanced treatises. In this respect the book must be 

 pronounced disappointing. Prof. Osborn is well 

 Unow n for his original work en insects parasitic on 

 domestic animals, yet here he dismisses the .\noplura 

 in seven lines, the Mallophaga in a single short page, 

 and refers to the Oestridse only by reproducing two 

 figures of horse bot-fly and its larvse, not even men- 

 tioning this most important family in his text. 

 .Siniil.irlv, in the section on the Hymenoptera there is 

 no special account of the saw-flies. Such omissions 

 are not compensated for by outlines of morphology and 

 classification, which, though the economic student 

 ought indeed to know them, and know them well, he 

 can find in half-a-dozen good elementary manuals. 



There is another branch of zoological inquiry which, 

 though most fundamental and important to the 

 economic student, is superficially dealt with in most 

 elementary text-books — the branch that deals with the 

 Victors of evolution. .\ fairly full and critical sum- 

 mary of modern developments of the theory of descent 

 would be of vast benefit to the scientific agriculturist, 

 for example. Prof. Osborn discusses these questions 

 in eight pages, and the summary is necessarily so 

 condensed as to be practically useless to a beginner. 

 It were surely better to make no mention at all of the 

 Darwinian and Mendelian theories than to describe 

 them in ten and fourteen lines respectively. 



.A word of praise is due to the clear printing of the 

 book and to the illustrations, which, with a few 

 exceptions —printed so darkl\- as to be .-ilmost unrecog- 

 nisable — are very well reproduced. 



While Prof. Osborn's book is writ.cn m.iinlv from 

 the standpoint of the North .American worker, .Mr. 

 Slebbing's deals almost exclusively with Indian forest 

 zoology. .After a general introduction, in which the 

 principles of structure are illustrated mainly from the 

 \ irtebrata, the invertebrate phyla—e.xcept the .Arthro- 

 |Kjda-are dismissed in six pages. The .Arthropoda 

 are described in 148 images, and of these 136 are 

 devoted to an account of the Insecla. The chapters 

 included in this section form the original and valuable 

 part of the book. The author states in his preface 

 that it could not have been uriiten seven years ago, 

 and the number of life-histories of forest insects, 

 especially among the Curculionida^ and Scolytid»! 

 described ;ind figured bears testimony to the industry 

 and power of observation displayed by Mr. Stebbing. 

 liifortunately, many of his drawings have been very 

 coarsely reproduced; our Government publishing de- 

 partments- both at home and " beyond the seas "— 

 h.ive much to learn, for the heavy, unattractive ap- 

 pi-.irance of too many scientific works marks their 

 '• official ■' origin at a glance. In .some cases, how- 

 ever, .Mr. Stebbing's photographs and figures have 

 been treated with full justice; for example, the stages 

 of Hoplocerambyx in a sal tree (Figs. 193, 194) form a 

 beautiful ,-ind instructive picture. In following Dr. 

 Sh.-irp's volumes of the "' Cambridge Natural History," 

 it is unfortunate that Mr. Stebbing should have copied 

 NO. 20-I4, \'OI.. 7i)j 



the antiquated arrangemenl of insectan orders now- 

 abandoned by Dr. Sharp himself. It is disappointing 

 also to find that both Mr. Stebbing and Prof. Osborn 

 retain the unnatural "Class Myriapoda." 



The concluding section of Mr. Stebbing's book com- 

 prises short accounts of the classes, orders, and leading 

 families of Vertebrata, with special reference to the 

 Indian fauna, illustrated with cuts mostly reproduced 

 from the volumes of the " Fauna of British India." 

 The most valuable feature of these summaries is in 

 the accounts of damage done to forests by various 

 mammals and birds. Indeed, in .Mr. Slebbing's book, 

 as a whole, we have prominence given to the prac- 

 tical and technical aspects of zoology rather than to 

 those general facts and piinciples on which Prof. 

 Osborn lays the greater stress. G. H. Carpenter. 



ORSTiRriTJO.V, STUDY, AND NAMING OF 



PLANTS. 



Nature Ramble.'' in London. By Miss K. M. Hall. 



Pp. xviii+325. (London : Hodder and Stoughton, 



n.d.) Price 3.S. 6d. net. 

 Life Historic.-; of Common Plants. By Dr. F. Cavers. 



Pp. xvi + 363. (Cambridge : University Tutorial 



Press, Ltd., 1908.) Price 3X. 

 The Young Botanist. By W. Percival \\estell and 



C.S.Cooper. Pp. xxxix+ 199. (London : Methuen 



and Co., n.d.) Price 3s. bd. net. 



PUBLIC gardens and parks provide better facilities 

 for the observation of trees and shrubs than it 

 is possible to obtain on rambles in the country, so 

 that dwellers in London have full opportunity for 

 pursuing the study of these objects. Unfortunately, 

 many of the numerous visitors who frequent the parks 

 have not the necessary knowledge or lack the train- 

 ing required to make the -best use of their oppor- 

 tunities. For these Miss Hall has prepared the notes 

 on nature rambles, written in non-technical language, 

 and arranged according to the seasons' changes. 

 .Apart from the discourses on trees, a considerable 

 amount of space is devoted to the descripiions of the 

 birds that reside in or frequent the parks, and not the 

 least interesting pages tell of the bee-hive that is 

 located under Miss Hall's charge in the Stepney 

 Gardens. The descriptive text is set off by the illustra- 

 tions supplied bv Mr. H. Irving, who has established 

 a reputation for his photographs of natural history 

 specimens. 



The title of I^r. Cavers 's book may suggest a 

 series of short monographs on selected types; it fur- 

 nishes, however, a compendium of the morphology 

 and phvsiology of the flowering plants, followed by 

 chapters on special orders or allied groups of plants. 

 For the study of elementary botany the course de- 

 lineated is both natural and practicable. The early 

 portion of the book follows somewhat similar lines to 

 the author's " Plant Biologx," but is not so full, and 

 is written in a more direct, i.e. less interrogative, 

 form. Phvsiology provides the fundaments of the 

 training, and a full set of experiments is outlined to 

 enable the student to gather his principles from per- 

 sonal observation or from attempted experiments, as 

 some are too uncertain for the student to manipulate. 



