138 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
not much more than 300 pages will not, after due consideration, be 
thought a small instalment. 
The more strictly historical chapters, of which there are eight 
or nine, are preceded by some 40 pages of an Introductory entitled 
Philosophy of Botanical History; a dissertation on how a history 
of botany ought to be written; enquiry as to several different lines 
along which progress ought to take place and should be recorded. 
Here the somewhat too restricted views of certain earlier historians 
are adverted to; restrictions due to less comprehensive notions as to 
what botany teniiy is. Also in this Introductory it is shown that 
botany, even scientific botany, is so very ancient that its earliest 
beginnings are traceable to no book, but antedate all writing ; that 
no plant name in any language is the name of an individual plant ; 
that every such name unmistakably implies botanical classification ; 
that these common terms in the speech of every people, plant names, 
are every one either generic, specific or varietal, not excluding 
family names, which also occur in the oldest known books that 
deal with plants. 'Thus, it is shown, is systematic botany of some 
kind among the very essentials of human speech and writing, 
whensoever plants are to be considered. "This, apparently the true 
philosophy of the ere of the science, and of its history, seems to 
be Doctor Greene’s o 
Directly followings a short chapter on earliest traces of philos- 
ophic botany in very ancient Greek writing, there is a long one 
on Theophrastus of Eresus, whom the most competent botanical 
scholars, up to less than a hundred years ago agreed in styling the 
Father of Botany as a science; whom also our later generations 
have known nothing of. To the readers of Doctor Greene’s Land- 
marks it will appear as if the fundamentals of even modern botany 
had been settled, set forth in public lectures at ancient Athens, 
and written into a book by this philosopher two and twenty centuries 
ago. 
The chapter on Theophrastus occupies 90 pages, and is the 
largest one in the volume. The leading paragraphs of the chapter 
are in the following succession, and the eye is guided to each by 
type: Life, Method (in general), Vegetative Organography, 
deber Fruit and Seed, Anatomy, Phytography, Taxon omencla- 
, Transmutation (of species, and een genera). 
T a contribution to the written history of our science all this 
matter is new, and will be apt to prove instructive reading to most 
