February 13, 1902] 



NA TURE 



341 



of the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada, was 

 published in The American Geologist for July 1900. It 

 needs careful revision, but might be made the foundation 

 of a good bibliography. Sir William took so prominent 

 a place in his time that there must be many hundreds of 

 his friends and pupils who, while delighted to have his 

 autobiojjraphical sketch, would be glad to possess a fuller 

 memorial of the man and of his achievements in the cause 

 of science and of education. A. G. 



THE FLORA OF INDIA ILLUSTRATED. 

 Annals of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta. Vol. ix. 



Part i. A Second Century of New and Rare Indian 



Plants. (Calcutta: 1901.) 

 ^1 /"ITH the exception, perhaps, of Brazil, the flora of 

 » • which has been more systematically illustrated, 

 the flora of no country of very large area is so well 

 pictorially illustrated as that of India. Disregarding 

 the earlier publications of less precision, there are the 

 works of Wight, Wallich, Roxburgh, Griffith, Royle and 

 Hooker, and, later, of Brandis, Beddome and others, to 

 say nothing of the very numerous scattered figures of 

 Indian plants. 



In 1 888 Dr. i^novv Sir George) King, then Superin- 

 tendent of the Calcutta Botanic CJarden, commenced pub- 

 lishing a new series of quarto illustrations of Indian plants 

 under the title cited above. The first volume contains 

 all th^ Indian species of Ficus ; the second the species 

 of .\rtocarpus, Quercus and Castanopsis ; both by King 

 himself. The third volume is an illustrated monograph of 

 the Indian species of the herbaceous genus Pedicularis, by 

 Dr. D. Prain, the present Superintendent of the Calcutta 

 Garden. The fourth volume is devoted to the Anonaceie, 

 by King ; and the fifth contains a century of orchids, edited 

 by Sir Joseph Hooker, and a century of new and rare 

 Indian plants, by King and P. Briihl. The sixth volume 

 is of a different character, and illustrates some of the 

 microscopic researches of Dr. D. D. Cunningham. The 

 seventh is a fully illustrated monograph of the Bambuse;t 

 of India, by Mr. J. S. Gamble. The eighth volume, 

 nominally, consists really of three thick volumes and 

 comprises 448 coloured plates of Indian orchids, by Sir 

 George King and Mr. R. Pantling. Each of these 

 volumes has been more or less fully noticed in N.\ture 

 as it appeared. 



The first part of the ninth volume'contains a second 

 century of new and rare Indian plants, by King and 

 Prain and Mr. J. F. Duthie, Director of the Botanical 

 Department, Northern India. Remarkable among 

 these novelties are five beautiful species of Meconopsis 

 (Papaveracea;), thus nearly doubling the number of 

 this essentially Himalayan genus. The specific names, 

 grandis, superba, bella and primulina^ are suggestive 

 of the ornamental characters which these herbaceous 

 plants possess in a high degree. Unfortunately they 

 are rather difficult to cultivate, but one or two species 

 succeed very well in the rock-garden at Kew. Two or 

 three very fine species of Meconopsis are among the com- 

 paratively recent discoveries in western China, and M. 

 hor>idula is one of the most generally dispersed plants 

 in the meagre flora of Tibet, at altitudes of 13,000 to 

 17,000 feet. Indeed, all the .Asiatic species inhabit high 

 levels, and some of them reach the upper limit of 

 NO. 1685, VOL. 65] 



phanerogamic vegetation. The only outliers of the 

 genus are M. Canibrica, the lowly Welsh poppy, and 

 AT. heterophylla, a native of California. One of the 

 finest of the species figured in the " Annals," Al. grandis, 

 is only known from Jongri, in Sikkim, where it is cultivated 

 at altitudes of 10,000 to 12,000 feet, not for its beauty, 

 however, but for the oil obtained from its seeds. Figures 

 are given of three other pretty Papaveraceas, namely, 

 Cathcartia lyrata, C. polygonoides and Chelidonium 

 Dicranostigina. 



From a botanical standpoint the drawings are very 

 good, and the lithography deserves to be rated as excel- 

 lent. Nearly the whole is the work of native artists. 



We have made a point of the new Papaveraceae, but 

 there are other equally interesting subjects illustrated in 

 this part. New Rutacea;, Burseracea: and Sapindaceas, 

 chiefly by King ; Legurainosx and Labiata;, by Prain ; 

 and alpine Himalayan plants, including new species of 

 Primula, by Duthie. 



There is also a proposed new genus of Orobanchacese, 

 concerning which particulars of its affinities might have 

 been given. It is named Gleadovia riiborum, and was 

 discovered by Messrs. Gleadow and Gamble growing on 

 the roots of Rubies niveus, in fir woods, in the North-west 

 Himalaya. The great value of such a publication as the 

 "Annals" can only be appreciated by the working 

 botanist, and it will be of general interest to know that 

 plants of special economic interest will be a feature in 

 the next part. W. Botting Hemsley. 



OUR BOOK SHELF. 



Essais sur la Philosophic des Sciences. Analyse, 

 Mecaniqiie. By C. de Freycinet. Second edition. 

 Pp. xiii 4- 336. (Paris : Gauthier V'illars, 1900) 

 A GOOD book on the philosophical aspect of space, time, 

 mass and force is rare. M. de Freycinet has produced a 

 work that is both readable and worth reading. It opens 

 with a chapter on space and time in which the essential 

 differences of these two fundamental conceptions are 

 discussed, and the impossibility of forming a quanti- 

 tative estimate of time except by artificial means is 

 clearly pointed out. The next chapters deal with the 

 notions of infinity, of continuous magnitude, of limits, of 

 infinitesimals and of differential coefficients. In con- 

 sidering the reality of such conceptions, the author is 

 careful to distinguish between reality in a mathematical 

 and in a physical sense, and to point out that reality in 

 the first sense does not necessarily imply reality in the 

 second. Thus the solutions by the calculus of many 

 problems in mathematical physics are based on the 

 assumption that both space and matter are continuous 

 and capable of indefinite subdivision, and these solutions 

 are none the less correct although other phenomena 

 teach us that matter is to be regarded as built up of dis- 

 crete molecules. 



The second part deals with the quantities occurring in 

 dynamics, the laws of motion, the principle of conservation 

 of energy In it M. de Freycinet has endeavoured in 

 the present second edition to throw greater light on the 

 debated question as to the relative parts played by 

 Galileo and Kepler in the discovery of the laws of motion. 

 According to him these laws consist of (i) the law of 

 equality of action and reaction, due to Newton ; (2) the 

 law of inertia, now attributed to Kepler ; (3) the law of 

 independence of movements due to Galileo, according to 

 which the relative motion of the parts of a system is 

 unaltered by impressing a common velocity on them ; and 

 (4) the law of equivalence of work and heat due to Mayer 



