August 2, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



137 



inence of his particular field, and again, in a 

 department of the subject where his inves- 

 tigations and research have been so volumi- 

 nous, it might seem to him a more hopeless 

 task than elsewhere to present more than 

 an abstract within the limits he had decided 

 upon. 



A point of peculiar excellence in this 

 work is the terminology. Indeed, the re- 

 viewer has but one complaint to make, and 

 that is that a somewhat too wide implica- 

 tion is permitted to the term 'spore.' It 

 would seem advisable upon theoretical as 

 well as upon practical grounds to limit 

 zygotes, oospores or oosperms under another 

 name, which should indicate their sexual 

 origin. But the conservatism apparent in 

 Dr. Vines' use of ' spore ' in the general 

 sense is more than atoned for by his splen- 

 did development of the Schwendener-Van 

 Tieghem terminology of the vascular and 

 stelic tracts, by his masterly treatment of 

 conjunctive and cortical tissue, by his illu- 

 minating explanation of secondary increase 

 in thickness and in the special portion by his 

 thorough and adequate separation of sporo- 

 phytic from gametophytic terminology. 

 This latter becomes a trifle less perfect in 

 handling when the angiosperms are taken 

 up, but even here, if one makes a slight 

 mental alteration in the sequences, there is 

 no trouble in gaining an accurate idea of the 

 homologies. For an exactly logical presen- 

 tation of life-histories, it is not clear that Dr. 

 Vines would not have served his purposes as 

 well by always discussing the gametophyte 

 in detail before passing to the sporophyte. 

 In point of fact, the gametophyte is given 

 prior treatment until the Ptei'idophytes are 

 reached, and then, in the ascending order, 

 the sporophyte is given its handling before 

 the gametophyte. This is, of course, in de- 

 ference, perhaps unconscious, to the ancient 

 notion that the larger or more potent in vege- 

 tation of the two alternating forms is the 

 plant, while the other is to a degree sub- 



sidiary. It is not apparent that it would 

 not on the whole have been better to give 

 the phylogenetically older gametophyte its 

 proper precedence in all cases from Oedo- 

 gonium to AngiospermEe. 



The wealth of terminology has by some 

 unthinking reviewers been condemned as 

 making the whole work unnecessarily tech- 

 nical in tone and even giving a flavor of 

 pedantry to the whole. In reply to such 

 criticisms. Dr. Vines might aptly point 

 out that a certain class of botanical text- 

 books which inform one that the ' spores are 

 the seeds of the fungi,' for example, follow 

 this valuable rule of calling fundamentally 

 different things by the same name. In such 

 cases the terminology is simple, and so is the 

 state of mind of the student who has fol- 

 lowed it. Modern botany is scarcely the 

 young person's discipline of floral delecta- 

 tion that it was earlier supposed to be, and 

 it does no harm to have a clear, clean-cut, 

 limitation of different concepts under differ- 

 ent names. 



In the taxonomic portion of the work 

 there is a conservative tone about the an- 

 giosperm arrangement which betokens the 

 persistence of the great influence of Eobert 

 Brown, Lindley and Bentham. This is in 

 interesting contradistinction to the firm 

 touch with which the author places Isoetes 

 in its proper place alongside of Marattia and 

 to his modern grouping of algse, fungi and 

 bryophytes. It should be taken as evidence, 

 it may be, of the timidity with which the 

 serious student of morphology approaches 

 the antiquated delusions of sj'stematic bot- 

 anists which, more than any other delusions 

 of botanical science, are embalmed in sump- 

 tuous volumes, under the ffigis of powerful 

 reputations and upon the foundations of 

 scientific officialism. The cryptogams, so- 

 called, are recognized to be a more modern 

 and plastic group — from the point of view 

 of investigation. Hence, one who trusts to 

 his own good judgment and to the van- 



