SureeN?! LITERATURE: 
BOOK REVIEWS. 
The survival of the unlike. 
THE making of books is easy to Professor Bailey, if one may judge from 
the number and rapidity with which they come from his pen. Besides new 
editions of the Nursery book and the Horticulturist’s rule-book, the ink is 
hardly dry upon Plant breeding until the Survival of the unlike appears. 
The Evolution of our native fruits is said to be in press, and we are prom- 
ised shortly a book on pruning, one on the apple, and a school text-book of 
otany! Professor Bailey is a living disproof of the doctrine that overpro- 
ductiveness i is at the expense of the quality of fruit. 
The present book* has involved recently only the labor of revision, since 
it is a collection of essays which have been read from time to time in the last 
six years before various scientific bodies. All of them have been published 
before, but are scattered from Dan to Beersheba in all sorts of reports, pro- 
ceedings, and journals. Were there nothing but the question of convenience 
involved it were well to bring them together. 
But the botanist and horticulturist will find both interest and instruction 
in these essays. To the botanist they are particularly suggestive, for his 
studies too often cease at the garden fence. As a study in variation they 
bring to his attention many facts new to him, of which he would do well to 
take heed lest he teach theories which facts are against. Professor Bailey's 
thesis—it may almost be called—is this: ‘Heredity is an acquired force; 
normally and originally unlike produces unlike.” He “denies the common 
assumption that organic matter was originally endowed with the power of 
reproducing all its corporeal attributes, or that, in the constitution of things, 
like produces like.” Now this view is at first somewhat startling, but botan- 
ists know already many facts which support it, and Professor Bailey intro- 
duces many facts in the course of the essays to strengthen it. 
In the second and third essays, respectively ‘““Neo-Lamarckism and neo- 
Darwinism” and “The philosophy of bud variation,” the author shows 
clearly the untenability of Weismann’s germ-plasm theory as concerns 
\ plants. The latter essay is particularly striking in setting forth the idea that 
bud variation is not rare and exceptional, but common ; that it is of great 
TRAILEY, L. H.—The survival of the unlike: a collection of ae essays 
suggested by the study of apreg plants. I2mo. pp. 515. figs. New ior 
The Macmillan Co. 1896. 
500 [DECEMBER 
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