June 1, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



859 



and Lindley told, more or less in a nutshell, 

 what was known of economic plants, and the 

 exquisitively conceived little Treasury of Bot- 

 any of Lindley and Moore has made more in- 

 telligent gardeners than perhaps any other 

 one book. Still, when Mr. Nicholson of Kew 

 undertook the compilation of a Dictionary of 

 Gardening nearly a quarter of a century ago, 

 none of these works were sufficiently recent or 

 full to prevent his book from appealing to the 

 horticultural public, for whom it has done very 

 much. But a quarter of a century is a long 

 time as viewed by the gardener whose business 

 shifts from carnations to roses, from roses to 

 chrysanthemums, and from chrysanthemums to 

 cactus-dahlias, and whose need to meet closer 

 competition is often tided over by the intro- 

 duction of simpler or cheaper methods applied 

 to vast quantities of one thing that must be 

 marketed by thousands before the infinitesimal 

 profits have counted up to the point where 

 they require banking, though beyond this point 

 they may aggregate a very handsome revenue 

 each year if only the business done is large 

 enough; and this has led to the publication, 

 within recent years, of excellent floricultural 

 books, by Henderson, Scott, Hunt, and a host 

 of other men whose business success stands as 

 an endorsement of their teachings. 



But these books are limited in their object, 

 and although Nicholson's Dictionary has been 

 able to grow somewhat in the course of a long- 

 drawn-out rendition into other languages than 

 the English, it does not even then give all 

 the information needed to-day about decorative 

 plants ; and the newer methods by which suc- 

 cess has so largely been achieved in this country, 

 are not to be learned from it. Professor Bailey's 

 book, therefore, aiming at the presentation of 

 the plants and methods of American horticulture 

 to-day, meets a real need in the library and the 

 potting-shed, and it would be just as useful if 

 the year of its appearance did not end in two 

 ciphers, though its historic reference value may 

 possibly be enhanced by the catching circum- 

 stance that it presents these facts as they exist 

 at the end of the nineteenth century. 



If the entire authorship of such a work had 

 fallen upon one man, Professor Bailey possesses 

 a suflBciently broad knowledge of botany and 



horticulture to have written it well, and if, as 

 he plans, it shall all appear within a year from 

 the time when we are privileged to open the first 

 volume, he will have shown an administrative 

 faculty, that, in botanical book-making in this 

 country, stands alone, except for Dr. Britton's 

 prompt publication of the illustrated flora of our 

 eastern states, which several times found men- 

 tion in these columns a few years ago. Of 

 course he would not have been able to effect 

 this prompt publication unaided, and no small 

 credit for the result attaches to his energetic 

 collaborator, Mr. Miller ; and well as he might 

 have written it, he would not have done it alone 

 so authoritatively as he has done it with the aid of 

 corps of specialists, comprising the best botanists 

 and the most expert gardeners of the country, 

 whose names occupy several pages of double 

 column matter at the beginning of the book, 

 and behind whom stand still other helpers 

 whose names at their own request do not ap- 

 pear, though his readers get the benefit of their 

 knowledge. 



I suppose that it is impossible for the most 

 rational of men to open a book without finding 

 in it more than they expected, or to lay it down 

 without a sigh of regret at the absence of some- 

 thing that they wanted to find. Professor 

 Bailey's book is not different from other books 

 in these respects. Open it where you will, and 

 you find a tasty cut or a catching paragraph 

 which holds your attention and gives you some- 

 thing you had not intended to look for. And 

 yet if you are an every-day gardener and want 

 to distinguish the different varieties of chrysan- 

 themum or carnation, of apricot or cauliflower, 

 you may fail to find there the means of doing so. 



Where races differing from one another more 

 than many species do in nature are made to 

 order, almost to drawing and specification, on 

 a few years' notice, it is very difficult either to 

 find space for their description in a book of any 

 reasonable size or phraseology that can supply 

 to the ordinary reader the distinctions that are 

 patent to the eye of the specialist. The editors 

 have therefore, without doubt, done wisely in a 

 very conservative treatment of these necessarily 

 transient forms, which pass from view as a rule 

 almost as suddenly as they appeared with gor- 

 geous lithographic depiction in the catalogues 



