227 



nantly tropical groups occurring there — the ferns — is a welcome' 

 addition to his previous work on that locality. As a local flora 

 should, the book giv^es, in an introduction, an account — and a 

 very good one — of the geological, physical, and vegetational 

 aspects of the Keys, to which Dr. Small limits "tropical Florida." 

 There follows a systematic treatment of the 53 species of ferns 

 and fern-allies known to grow there — a treatment abreast of the 

 latest studies, with keys, full descriptions and notes on the mode 

 of growth, habitat, time of discovery in Florida and range else- 

 where of each species. These notes are not only interesting 

 in subject-matter, but readable and attractive in style. Five 

 half-tone plates of ferns in situ, from photographs by the author, 

 form an excellent supplement to them. Furthermore, each 

 species is illustrated in a text-figure, after the manner made 

 familiar by the Illustrated Flora. There is probably no group 

 of plants in which such illustration is of more value than in the 

 ferns, where the characters necessarily used in the delimitation 

 of species are often hard to describe intelligibly, but easy to 

 picture. And no one could ask for better figures than Miss 

 Mary E. Eaton has furnished — accurate, life-like and, in spite 

 of their small size, beautifully clear in detail. Rarely, text and 

 figures fail to agree. The sporophyll of Lycopodium adpressum 

 figured on p. 65, for instance, is certainly not "abruptly subulate 

 from a more or less toothed base" ; but here the advantage seems 

 to be with the artist rather than the author. There is also an 

 ample glossary, a list of authors cited and a rather brief index. 



Probably no book ever entirely suited its reviewers. From 

 the point of view of the working systematist, amateur or pro- 

 fessional, this shows one defect in technique surprising in a 

 taxonomist of Dr. Small's keenness and long experience, and 

 offers some opportunity for a homily on points of wider appli- 

 cation than to it alone. The one new species proposed in the 

 book (p. 31) is described in terms so general that anyone, on the 

 evidence of the description alone, would be justified in reducing 

 it to a synonym of Pteris longifolia, from which, as hitherto 

 interpreted, it is a segregate. Moreover, the facts that it is such 



