494 FLOWERING PLANTS AND FERNS. 
reference, however, in spite of its incompleteness and other draw- 
backs, the work will always be useful. 
We have already said (p. 886) that we were unable to accept 
Messrs. Warne’s high estimate of their reissue of Miss Pratt’s 
book, and that Mr. Step's editing and revision were not altogether 
successful; but we certainly expected better things from him. Mr. 
Step, although he has never shown any indication of anything 
approaching a critical knowledge of British plants, is a favourable 
specimen of the popular writer upon them. He is probably not 
accountable for the decision to reprint in full the curiously belated 
text, with its references to persons long since dead as if the 
still among us, and its early Victorian verses, ‘‘ written for our 
volume by Mary Isabella Tomkins” and other poets of equal note. 
additions to our flora. E. latifolia, by the way, is still stated to 
occur ‘in various 3 ne e sea”; it is practically certain 
that Miss Pratt’s “latifolia” included, if it was not confined to, 
a form of Centaurium, while the true latifolia seems to have been 
extinct for many years. 
The conspi lterati not improvements. For example, 
the ‘ English” now precedes the Latin name in the descriptions, so 
that “Gentianella ’—a name in frequent popular use for Gentiana 
Whence they co 
edition of The Flowering Plants of Great Britain is entirely inadequate 
-* oe of the British Flora at the close of the nineteenth 
