56 MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
Book Reviews. 
———— 
A New BookLET OF BOTANY. * 
Comparing this with other recent books on the same subject, 
one might with perhaps equal propriety designate it a Booklet of 
New Botany ; there is so much of newness and originality in it, and 
this notwithstanding that the plants dealt with are for the most 
„part old, and presumably well known. 
The title, Elysium Marianum, is not a title of the condescend- 
ing sort; that is to say, the unlettered will not know by the book- 
let’s mere title, that it treats of plants, and is therefore a booklet of 
botany. Only the really educated and cultivated mind will readily 
infer that Elysium Marianum will prove a treatise on the delight- 
some woodland and meadow and park and wayside denizens of 
Maryland ; and it is a new thing, almost, in modern botany, for an 
author to emphasize, in the title of his book, not the science itself, 
but rather, the exalted pleasure and refined delight which the 
pursuit of botany enkindles in the soul of every one who, having 
given both mind and soul much and careful culture, betakes himself 
to the study of plant life and form. All this, which the Latin title 
itself suggests, comes out clearly and explicitly, in English, in the 
brief Preface that introduces the first Part ; and at the foot of these 
prefatory notes alone, >y the way, and E on the title-page, does 
the author's name ap 
This dci: issue of the ELYSIUM is of 96 pages sup- 
plemented by 12 fine plates. The first Part treats of the ferns and 
fern-allies of Maryland and Virginia; the second of the coniferous 
trees and shrubs of the same region. And while the title and the 
preface, as we have said, promise somewhat of the aesthetic in the 
treatment of things, yet this turns oùt to be something altogether 
different from, and in reality far above the merely popular account 
of the plants and trees taken under consideration. While giving in 
after paragraphs and elsewhere full expression to pleasing thought 
and lofty sentiment, the first thing everywhere is the accurate 
scientific account—the rigid morphologic diagnosis—of the plant 
ur ag the statement of the several marks by which the really ` 
M foe Washington, D. C.. Part I, 1907; Part Hs 
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