BOOK REVIEWS 



AN ILLUSTRATED FLORA OF THE 

 PACIFIC STATES* 



The appearance of the first volume of Professor Abrams' 

 Illustrated Flora is an important event in North American 

 botany, and marks an era in the botanical history of the Pacific 

 States. Hitherto the Pacific coast has been noteworthy as a 

 part of the United States that has never possessed any de- 

 scriptive work dealing with its flora as a whole; now, suddenly, 

 it takes its place as the only section of our country, except the 

 northeastern states, with a general flora containing descriptions 

 and illustrations of every species of its flowering plants and ferns. 

 To be sure, the volume before us is only one of the three needed 

 to complete the work, but there seems no reason why the re- 

 maining volumes should not follow with reasonable promptness. 



This book is frankly patterned after Britton & Brown's 

 Illustrated Flora, and follows its style very closely indeed. 

 The pages are of approximately the same size, the type and 

 illustrations of similar style, and the new flora even follows its 

 prototype in the system of nomenclature adopted and in the 

 attempt to assign to each species an English name as well as the 

 technical Latin one. Perhaps the most conspicuous differences 

 are (i) the decapitalization of all specific names; (2) the use of 

 the metric system for all plant measurements. 



The present volume includes all of the pteridophytes, gym- 

 nosperms, and monocotyledons, and eleven families of the di- 

 cotyledons, its scope being almost the same as that of the first 

 volume of Britton & Brown's work; it comprises 568 pages, and 

 contains 1299 figures, of which more than one thousand appear 

 here for the first time. Typographical errors are few for a work 

 of this character. The most serious one observed is on the 

 title-page, where the author's name is printed as if it were 

 "Leroy," although he writes it "Le Roy" and commonly ab- 

 breviates it to "L. R." 



The area covered by Abrams' flora is only about one fifth of 

 that included by Britton and Brown, but the topography is 

 much more diversified, so that it is hardly surprising that, in 



* Abrams, Le Roy. An illustrated flora of the Pacific States: Washington, 

 Oregon, and California. In three volumes. Vol. I, Ophioglossaceae to Aristolo- 

 chiaceae, xi + 557 pages, with 1299 figures in the text. Stanford University, 

 California, Stanford University Press, [15 My] 1923. 



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