74 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
and send them back in large quantities to the United States as 
prime French prunes. We are quite sure that, from the respected 
position which oo oe holds among the Californian industrial 
magnates, he is no sympathizer with this form of pious fraud. 
The illustrations to the volume are as redolent of inflated impor- 
tance as the text, though as pictures many of them are interesting 
and clearly rawn. The Ailend Some is the “improved amaryllis, 
y th 
monstrosities as ‘es here figur a would stably even astonish the 
ions of the fam 
worth of seeds and bulbs in the packing-room.” Facing p. 809 is 
a picture which shows, ‘‘ Cultivating the mammoth pie-plant; Mr. 
Burbank is the central figure ”’ (characteristic position circu enna 
the text also). Again, another illustration facing p. 277 purports 
‘** showing method of grafting,’ which it scarcely does with clear- 
a 
ires more s d 
dollars.’’ Possibly the tee contributions to the morning mail 
coun rly 
m 
not until three or four in the afternoon ’’; but further on, ‘‘if he 
has been ea to lie late in the morning, frequently but two 
meals a day are eaten,” though <— suppress the alternative ex- 
planations of this aparent laxnes 
mm this book would be trifling. Mr. Bur 
bank is probably an pease nurseryman, who has been sbnvineraistly 
successful in business, and has heaped up dollars; and he would 
have been better advised had he not countenanced the effusive dis- 
play of hyperbole his biographer has indulged in n in narrating “all 
2 magne acts he has accomplished in the ennoblement ‘of the 
ea: 
Frepertic N. WILuiaMs. 
Notes on the Poe. History of British Flowering Plants. By the 
Right Hon. Lord Avesury, P.C., &., &¢., = ondon 
Macmillan & Co. 1905. Pp. xxiii i, 450. 15s. 
Tue object of this work, as the pemiate tells us, i 3e supple- 
ment existing floras by deseribi g points of inte: an in the life- 
. Babi 
supply. Such points are the ‘sflgars and equipment of the 
ower, the arrangement and character of leaves, the construction 
seed 
, 
Ss Pp. 5, 
also, the habits of the plant itself, and, in a ee 
