1896 | CURRENT LITERATURE 501 
importance in the production of new garden varieties (no less than 300 of 
such origin being grown at present in this country); and that it is of the same 
fundamental nature as seed variation. The key to this is to be found in the 
sentence, “The truth is . . . . that every branch or phyton is a bud 
variety, differing in greater or lesser degree from all other phytons on the 
same plant.” 
But the book must be read to be appreciated. There are too many fruit- 
ful ideas to permit discussion of them in detail. We have further space only 
_ to quarrel with two. 
We doubt whether the idea of the phyton, of which the author makes a 
point, is of any real value, morphologically or physiologically. Will not 
rather the idea of the shoot, whether primary, secondary, or of higher order, 
answer Professor Bailey’s purpose better? That shoots as a whole, and the 
phytons taken from different shoots, are unlike every one knows. But do 
noteworthy differences exist between the successive internodes of a shoot? 
It is not unlikely that our author would assent to this change, for we find him 
Saying on p. 250, ‘We are bound to look upon every branch as in some 
“Sense a distinct individual, since it is unlike every other branch.” Yet 
recently we found the conception of the phyton about to be introduced into an 
elementary book on botany for horticultural students “because Professor 
Bailey uses it in his writings.” Wherefore the query. 
There is one essay which we think the author would have done a service 
either by omitting or by radically altering, the one on sex in fruits. Pro- 
_fessor Bailey, in an earlier part of this volume, reprints his note from Scéence 
on the “Untechnical terminology of the sex relation in plants,” and reasserts 
his Conviction that the ascription of sex-relations to the sporophyte by the 
_lse of sex terms is “ perfectly proper,” and often necessary for perspicuity. 
Of course he is entitled to this opinion, in spite of the botanists who hold it to 
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Sure that when Professor Bailey gives this matter the consideration it 
““ttves he will be as unwilling to have his philosophy shut in by the 
— fence as he is desirous that botanists should not have theirs stop - 
Mit—C. R 
MINOR NOTICES. 
just received separates of two papers from the Transactions of 
Academy of Science for 1893-4, one on the Erysiphee of Riley 
Bo kanes, by Lora L. Waters, and the other a list of the grasses of 
Sas, by Professor A. S. Hitchcock. 
_ WE nave 
the Kansas 
