CURRENT LITERATURE 
BOOK REVIEWS 
Textbooks of plant physiology 
The third edition of GREEN’s Vegetable physiology" is a newly printed, if 
not a newly written, book. The first impression to be gained by one who is 
already familiar with the second edition is that the present volume is a better 
piece of book manufacture than the older one; especially are the figures brought 
out much more clearly on the new paper. 
A careful comparison of the second and third editions brings out the fact 
that the essentials of the book remain unchanged in the latter. A good many 
changes which comprise but a few words are to be noted; some statements 
are strengthened or weakened or dropped out; some records of discoveries or 
suggested hypotheses which were originally expressed in the present perfect 
tense are now thrown into the past; words and phrases are added or removed 
in the interest of clearness or of elegance; and the paragraphing of the older 
matter has been here and there improved. A number of new paragraphs 
have been inserted and some old ones have been supplemented; a few have 
been totally rewritten. In but a very few cases has the arrangement of the 
paragraphs been radically altered. A very few figures have been improved 
made are in the direction of the improvement of an already very readable and 
scholarly treatise, he is distinctly of the opinion that these changes are gener- 
ally unimportant, and that those who know the second edition practically 
know also the third 
In general, the chemical considerations seem better framed than the physi- 
cal ones; the former are often excellent, while the latter are more frequently 
slighted or seemingly treated in a merely perfunctory way. The time-worn 
logical fallacy, for example, of supposing that turgidity of cells is produced by 
hydrostatic pressure (a pressure exerted by water to distend a membrane 
permeable to water, through which, indeed, the very water to produce this 
outward pressure is supposed to have just passed!) is here met with anew. 
Even by assuming the position that the results of transpiration are the 
reasons for its occurrence, the reviewer is unable to follow the argument of 
p. 82, wherein it is implied that growth is slow in cacti, etc., because the trans- 
piration rate is low. The proposition appears to be that much water must be 
*GREEN, J. ReyNoLps, An introduction to vegetable Sega 3d ed. 
Pp. xviii+-470. figs. 182. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co. 
249 
