470 The Botanical Gazette. [December, 
of the Messrs. Harper, and some decidedly original ones added by the 
author. The latter, and some of the others are crude, ill-drawn, and 
even grotesque caricatures of what is intended, made all the worse 
looking by comparison with the graceful and artistic work of Hamilton 
Gibson and Alfred Parsons. 
The writer is evidently a lover of flowers and familiar with many 
of the flowering plants of the Atlantic region. In chapters relating to 
these she is at her best; but when she turns to physiology or to the 
lower plants, she writes a sorry mixture of fact and fancy. Even her 
facts seem to have been put into a kneading machine and thoroughly 
incorporated; and they are fed out often without the least reference 
to their relations. 
Some of the opening sentences of the book are calculated to give a 
botanist cold shudders. Witness: “The pursuit of botany ought to be 
ranked as an outdoor sport.” “For (and this is one of the points I 
wish to emphasize) botany is the easiest of all the sciences and can be 
engaged in without a teacher.” Which she has too evidently done. — 
The chapter on plant movements furnishes some queer information: 
“The boat-shaped desmids and diatoms jerk themselves over consider- 
able distances. The cilia (hair-like processes) of some mosses move 
about in water. Oscillaria are curious one-celled plants, which, 
under the microscope, look and wriggle like angle-worms.” But it 
is when the cryptogams are reached that the author flounders most 
hopelessly. These plants, she says, “possess this advantage over our 
garden plants, that many of them can be studied in winter.” “In such 
plants the sap does not circulate, but water passes freely though the 
cell walls.” “Azolla looks like a creeping moss or liverwort.” “Being 
small, many of them invisible to the naked eye, they [mosses ] do not 
need a fibrous skeleton.” In the scale-mosses “mixed with the spores are 
elaters, called macrospores.” “The scale-mosses under a microscope . 
look like lizards or curiously shaped reptiles.” Speaking of the lich- 
ens she says, “the gonidia, a layer of green cells in the thallus, under 
a transparent cover called the hypha, divide each one into two, and 
form new plants. They are parasitic upon the lower layer of the 
thallus.” 
The algze seem to be if possible less understood by the author than 
other groups. Speaking of alge in general, “the spores,” she says, 
“have a tendency to divide into four parts and are called tetraspote>. 
They are provided with cilia either in pairs or all around their ball- 
shaped bodies. . . . Each cell seems capable of propagating tW° 
new plants by division. Another remarkable means of propagation 1S 
by ‘conjugation’.” “Many alge are edible. The dulse of the Scotch 
che et ” 
Fe ors, ee, SP eae 
