1900] CURRENT LITERATURE 209 
A very prominent feature of the book is the description and illustration 
of substances used in substitutions and adulterations. These substances are 
treated in connection with the article adulterated or substituted, and the 
means of detecting them are made so clear that they will doubtless prove of 
great assistance. This is certainly one of the best works published upon the 
morphology and histology of the vegetable food products, their substitutes 
and adulterants. —OT1s W. CALDWELL. 
Letters of two botanists. 
THE LIFE-LONG correspondence between Unger and Endlicher, the two 
great Austrian botanists of that classical time of botanical reconstruction in 
the third and fourth decades of the century, has fortunately been preserved, 
having been bequeathed by Unger’s heirs to the Botanical Institute at the 
University of Graz. Dr. Haberlandt has published these letters in chrono- 
logical order, beginning with the date November Io, 1829, and ending March 
16, 1847, two years before Endlicher’s death. The letters are preceded by 
a general résumé of the historical content and significance of the correspond- 
ence. Ample footnotes furnish the reader with bearings on contemporaneous 
botanical history. Indeed, in the opinion of the reviewer, these constitute 
the most instructive part of the book. Such a grouping of historical facts 
about the lives of these two men revivifies the history of those decades of 
reawakening in a way that plain historical accounts cannot approach. It is the 
application of the newer methods of history to botany, and will be welcomed 
as such by students of the history of botany. The work ends with a detailed 
account of Endlicher’s death, including letters from his attending physicians 
which effectually refute the belief, current everywhere for a half century, that 
Endlicher took his own life. This idea was so firmly established that it found 
expression in nearly all biographical notices of the time, in lexicons, cyclo- 
pedias, and even in Sachs’ History of Botany. These letters here published 
for the first time leave no doubt in the mind of the reader that the death of 
the patient was natural, the result of disease attended by a long period of 
suffering. 
tematists. We are permitted to see for the first time the “ Unger-Endlicher- 
sche System” in its original form, and to observe it from its inception through 
its various modifications to the time of its publication. It seems that more Is 
3HABERLANDT, G.: Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Unger und Stephan Endlicher. 
8v0. pp. v-+ 184. Two portraits and facsimiles of two letters. Berlin : Gebriider Born- 
traeger. 1899. M5. 
