Bibliography. 183 



and every candidate for the doctorate, as well as every licensed apoth- 

 ecary, is required to sustain an examination upon this science. In the 

 United States, on the contrary, no medical college Avithin our know- 

 ledge, has a separate botanical professorship, or requires any know- 

 ledge of the science as a requisite for graduation ; and very few, in- 

 deed, iTiake provision for a course of botanical lectures ! It would not 

 be difficult to assign the principal causes of this neglect amongst us, 

 of what is elsewhere deemed not only an important, but an indispensa- 

 ble branch of medical instruction ; but however this may be, we can- 

 not believe that such a state of things will be much longer permitted to 

 exist. 



3. Elements of Botany, structural., ijliysiological, systematical, and 

 medical ; being a fourth edition of the Outline of the First Principles 

 of Botany ; by John Lindley, Ph. D., F, E,. S., &c. &;c. London, 

 1841. pp. 292, 8vo. — The first part of this excellent text-book, con- 

 sists of an amplified and corrected edition of Dr. Lindley's celebrated 

 Outlines of the First Principles of Botany. In its original form, this 

 terse and pei'spicuous statement of the leading propositions of struc- 

 tural botany, having been annexed to the American reprint of the first 

 edition of the Introduction to the Natural System, is well known to the 

 botanists of this country ; many of whom, like the writer of this notice, 

 derived from it their earliest ideas of the science, and have not foi'got- 

 ten the intense gratification which the first glimpse of the fundamental 

 principles of structural and physiological botany afibrded them. The 

 third English edition was extended, so as to include a similar sketch of 

 systematical botany, and the alliances ofj)lants, in a tabular form ; the 

 latter being an amended translation of the author's Nixus Plantarum : 

 this formed the Key to Botany for the use of Classes, (80 pages, 8vo.) 

 published in the year 1835. In the present form, " the whole of the 

 structural and physiological part has been corrected with great care, 

 and made to include the most important views of modern physiologists, 

 so as to present the reader with a view of the state of botanical know- 

 ledge, in these departments in the spring of 1841 ;" and the whole is 

 very fully illustrated with excellent wood engravings. The second 

 part is devoted to systematical botany, which is defined to be, "the 

 science of arranging plants in such a manner that their names may be 

 ascertained, their affinities determined, their true place in a natural 

 system fixed, their sensible properties judged of, and their whole his- 

 tory elucidated with certainty and accuracy." It is principally occu- 

 pied with a plain and simple account of the natural families, as ar- 

 ranged by the lamented De Candolle, with their characters and leading 

 subdivisions, an enumeration of their typical genera, (which are mostly 



