NovKiinKB l;i, 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



62< 



tion of the meeting, he had uncovered just 

 outside the city thirty or forty Roman and 

 Prankish burials, as well as the remains of 

 an ancient Roman roadway. The skeletons 

 and funerary objects were left in their 

 original positions until after, our visit, 

 when they were removed— the skeletons to 

 the Berlin Museum, and all other olijects 

 to the Paulus Miiseum in Worms. Exca- 

 vations of a similar nature had also been 

 carried on under Dr. Koehl's direction at 

 three other localities. Near the West -end 

 School in Worms, we were permitted to see 

 burials of the llalLstatt epoch; while at 

 Monsheim and ]M61sheim, a few miles to 

 the west of Worms, neolithic burials and 

 dwelling sites, belonging to three different 

 epochs, were exposed to our view. Here 

 the pottery belongs to three distinct types, 

 as set forth in Dr. Koehl's 'Festschrift' 

 ('Die Bandkeramik der steinzeitlichen 

 Graberlelder und Wohnpliitze in der Um- 

 gebxmgen von Worms'), a.s follows: (1) 

 An early geometric potterv', the so-called 

 Hinklestcin type; (2) the Spiral-meander 

 t.vpe, and (3) a later geometric pottery or 

 Rossener tj'pe. 



The next meeting of the as.sociation will 

 be held in Greifswald, and is to include 

 on its program an excursion to the museums 

 of Stockholm. 



George Grant MacCurdy. 



YAii University Museum, 

 October 28, 1903. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 

 small's flora of the sovtueastern lnited 



STATES. 



Two works, each of them a masterpiece in 

 its time, have given us our principal knowl- 

 edge of the plants of the Southern United 

 States. The first, ' Elliott's Sketch of the 

 Botany of South Carolina and Georgia,' ap- 

 peared in 1821 to 1824. The second. ' Chap- 

 man's Flora of the Southern States,' was first 

 published in 1860, and was issued also in sub- 

 sequent editions with new matter in the form 



uf appendices. All botanists will welcome Dr. 

 John K. Small's ' Flora of the Southeastern 

 United States,' the new masterpiece of south- 

 ern botany. The book contains 1,370 pages, 

 besides twelve pages of introductory matter, 

 and describes 0,364 species — another illustra- 

 tion of the fact that we are living in a time of 

 men who do things. It is interesting to note 

 in this connection that the author, after giv- 

 ing us in these 1,382 pages the result of ten 

 years' persistent labor, required only a modest 

 twenty-five lines of preface to tell how he did 

 it. The work will be especially useful to 

 botanists in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and 

 Oklahoma because those districts have been 

 only imperfectly covered by the preceding 

 floras, which were based chiefly on material 

 from the South Atlantic states. The new 

 work does not, it is true, profess to contain 

 more than the plants east of the one hundredth 

 meridian, but in fact we do find in it such 

 distinctly desert types as the octillo, Fou- 

 quieria splendens, and the creosote bush, 

 Covillea tridentata. 



The book follows the Engler and Prantl 

 sequence, the American Association nomen- 

 clature and the metric system of measurement. 

 It also gives family names throughout a ter- 

 mination in -aceae, a practise which has al- 

 ready been adopted in the publications from 

 the United States National Herbarium and 

 which, it is believed, will meet with general ap- 

 proval. The name Brassicaceae, for example, 

 is a much more orderly, suitable and significant 

 designation for the mustard family than the 

 name Cruciferae, and it is only the greater 

 familiarity with the latter name which leads 

 many botanists still to cling to it. 



It has come to be generally recognized in 

 the last two decades that the generic grouping 

 of species would be much more convenient 

 and significant if the looser genera, containing 

 diverse groups of species, which had been 

 fashionable during the preceding half century, 

 were divided into genera each of which repre- 

 sented an evident genetic community. A sub- 

 division of these loose genera has been going 

 on for several years past in America and in 

 Germany. In Dr. Small's new book this 

 tendency has been carried to an extreme to 



