160 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [AUGUST 
dealing with the action of salts upon the lower plants are of this character, not 
only failing wholly to present the literature adequately, but making such 
bizarre selections therefrom as to force the conclusion that the papers discussed 
were brought together, like Cain’s rejected sacrifice, ‘“‘unculled, of such-as 
came to hand.”’ It is sincerely to be regretted that these sections of the book 
were not submitted to some physiologist or pathologist whose acquaintance 
with this field might have made of them a reliable summary of our present 
knowledge. 
If those portions of the book which are concerned with higher plants had 
been intended simply as a compilation of results of authors who have recorded 
visible effects of salts on plants, they would have fallen short of the mark by 
reason of the many and important omissions both of American and of German 
work. But the work professes to be critical, and this it emphatically is not. 
The author nowhere gives expression to her own beliefs or convictions in clear, 
unmistakable terms, nor does she evaluate for us the ideas of others. Con- 
clusions of the earlier workers, filled as they are with mistaken interpretations 
of results, are repeated without comment, and unproven assumptions and 
exploded theories stand side by side with established fact. Consequently, 
the reader not already thoroughly familiar with the literature will at once 
lose his bearings and grope his way blindly through a maze out of which he will 
carry at least as much of fundamental error as of ‘‘ascertained facts.” 
But it is in the sections dealing with the mode of action of toxic compounds 
upon protoplasm that the book is most vitally defective. The last ten years 
have been years of extraordinary advance in the study of protoplasmic per- 
meability and of its modifications under the action of external agencies, and 
the facts gained in this field have been utilized by a host of workers in formulat- 
ing theories of toxic and antitoxic action as phenomena arising primarily from 
modification of permeability. The literature dealing with these subjects is 
readily accessible and has, moreover, sss ntly been summarized in new editions 
of CzapEeK’s Biochemie and HoEBER’s Physikalische Chemie; . consequently 
there are few American chide irony in which the new knowledge - 
has failed to find its way into undergraduate instruction. Consequently it is 
appeared. A few examples will suffice to indicate this. The discussion of 
consequent increase in green weight with true sesame of protoplasmic 
activity, as on pp. 2, 3, 75, and this confusion exists throughout. One reads 
(pp. 40-41) that “‘it is very striking to see the desperate slots that badly 
