a 
1897 } CURRENT LITERATURE 125 
In the book before us, which is designed for teachers, the author has 
selected for study the morning glory, the ‘‘nasturtium” [Tropzolum], the 
‘‘jewel weed” [Impatiens], the scarlet geranium, and the hyacinth. The 
purpose is to use these plants as indicative of the problems that flowering 
plants suggest, and the spirit of the work is of the best. There is constant 
insistence that the plants are to be regarded as living things, engaged in a 
variety of very interesting work. The usual pedantic terminology, that has 
so long made the school study of flowering plants an exercise in definition of 
technical terms, is in the main suppressed, and certainly is never obtrusive. 
Suggestive comparisons abound, by which interest may be sustained and 
Structures understood. The book will certainly prove very useful to the 
teachers it is intended to serve; but is it not possible to make such work 
clear and. attractive to children without obscuring the facts? For example, 
when we are told that “if a pollen grain can join an ovule, both of them will 
live and form a seed ; but if the pollen grain cannot join an ovule both must 
die,” there may be a sense in which this is true, but the real impression apt 
to be left will be far enough from the truth. And the truth finds not much 
clearer expression in the statement, ‘‘Once on the pistil, the substance of the 
pollen grain passes down through the style to the ovary, where it unites with 
an ovule, thus giving it, as we may say, extra vitality.” Of course the sexu- 
ality of the stamens and pistils is strongly brought out, and much made of 
it. € cannot expect the actual non-sexual nature of these organs to be 
made clear to children, but there would seem to be no necessity for so per- 
sistently impressing an idea which must later be abandoned. The reader of 
the book would judge, moreover, that all plants do the work of photosyntax, 
and the statement is made that ‘‘it is the chlorophyll which does the eating 
for the plant.” In this same connection it is perhaps interesting to note, in 
a summary on the green part of the leaf, that ‘carbon dioxide is injurious to 
animal life, while oxygen is necessary to it; hence men and all animals are 
dependent upon the plant life for the air they breathe, and consequently for 
their existence. But, on the other hand, animals breathe out carbon dioxide, 
which the plant needs as food; hence the plant is dependent upon the ani- 
mals for its existence.” These quotations are taken quite at random, but 
they will serve to illustrate that dangerous tendency to philosophical specu- 
lation which, in the absence of a full knowledge of the facts, is never safe. 
Is it not possible to interest children by banishing speculation and sticking 
to the facts? We believe that it is—J. M. C. 
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MINOR NOTICES. 
PROFESSOR F. LAMSON SCRIBNER has issued, as Bulletin no. 7 of the 
Division of Agrostology, a book of illustrations entitled American Grasses. 
The author has had in preparation for some time a Handbook of North 
