18 



when the whole work can be completed. Another advantage is that 

 if changes or corrections are necessary or new species described 

 the new pages can be inserted in their proper places. The tem- 

 porary indices of the first three volumes are to be discarded now, 

 that of the present volume replacing them. Degener has been in 

 the islands since 1922, has travelled extensively in all the large 

 islands and employs several collectors to help him in the work. 

 Many of his specimens have been deposited in the herbarium of 

 the New York Botanical Garden. 



Desert Wild Flowers 



Desert Wild Flowers. Edmund C. Jaeger. Stanford University Press. 

 XII + 322 pages. 1940. $3.50. 



George T. Hastings 



To many of us the word "desert" originally suggested a barren 

 sandy waste, possibly the Sahara as pictured in our elementary 

 geographies, where nothing could grow, except in the rare oases. 

 Though we have outgrown these early ideas and know that many 

 plants are adapted to live in the desert, it may come as a surprise 

 to find 764 species described from the deserts of California. Quite 

 as much of a surprise, possibly, to know that cacti "are abundant 

 only in places where water supplies are seasonally plentiful" and 

 cannot grow at all in the driest parts of the desert. 



Edmund Jaeger is an authority on the biology of the California 

 deserts ; his The California Deserts published seven years ago was 

 followed by Denizens of the Desert — now these are supplemented 

 by Desert Wild Flowers. Like the former volumes, this is a popular 

 work for those visitors to and residents of southern California 

 interested in knowing the plants they see. There are no keys nor 

 scientific descriptions, instead there are outline drawings of prac- 

 tically all the plants, mostly made from living material in the field 

 during the twenty-five years that the author has been exploring 

 the Mohave and Colorado Deserts. He suggests that users of the 

 book carry indelible colored pencils to color the illustrations of the 

 plants they find. In addition to the drawings there are photographs 

 of some of the trees and shrubs and of the cacti. Incidentally, these 

 photographs give a fair idea of several types of desert country. 

 Naturally where there are closely related species in a genus, deter- 

 mination by drawings alone may l)e uncertain. In these cases the 



