162 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [AUGUST 
in the various sections dealing with experiments in which plants in nutrient 
solutions were employed, which of these was used in any particular case. 
The description of HASELHOFF’s experiments (p. 25) leaves the reader to wonder 
whether each sample of soil was extracted with 375 liters of water, divided into 
15 equal quantities, or with 25 liters used 15 successive times. The substitution 
of “below” for ‘‘above”’ in line 8, p. 30, would lead the unwary reader to 
conclude that the toxicity of copper is decreased as the concentration of the 
solution increases. The citations of literature are not numbered, and when a 
given author has a number of papers listed in the bibliography, the reader has 
made, normal solutions are sometimes converted to parts per million, sometimes 
have equivalents parenthetically introduced, and are sometimes carried over 
unchanged. Consequently, comparison of the figures is impossible without 
resorting to calculation. In the graphs showing dry weight of plants grown 
in various concentrations of salts, some one concentration, as 1/100,000, is 
chosen as a “unit,”’ and other concentrations are written in the graph as 
multiples or fractions of this unit, making easy reference impossible. Those 
hyphenated and immortal acquaintances of our early youth, ‘“‘carbo-hydrate”’ 
and “‘photo-synthesis,” greet a surprised public in these pages once more, after 
a generation of absence from the ken of physiologists. 
The concluding paragraph gives naive expression to a point of view which 
physiologists had supposed to be happily confined to a certain rapidly decreas- 
ing class of agricultural workers in this country. After discussing the results 
obtained by physiological experimentation with manganese and boric acid and 
those obtained in field trials of stimulatory fertilizers, the author says, ‘the 
possibility now exists that in some respects the two lines of work are converging 
and that the more purely scientific line will have a big contribution to make 
to the strictly practical line.” Those of us who regard plant physiology as the 
science of economic plant production had thought that the artificial lines of 
demarcation between “scientific” and “practical’? work had long ago dis- 
appeared, and that future progress was to be made, not independently or along 
convergent lines, but by the common utilization of scientific facts and methods 
in the cooperative attack upon common problems. In view of the fact that 
the long series of publications from the Rothamstead Experimental Station 
have set a standard to which comparatively little of the agricultural literature 
of this country has attained, it is surprising that this book, with its lamentable 
deficiencies in grasp of subject-matter and in point of view, should have been 
issued as the initial number of a series of monographs whose general editors. 
are Professor Woop, of Cambridge, and Director RussEtt, of Rothamstead. 
Closer editorial supervision would have withheld the book from publication 
