26 FOSSIL BOTANY. 



North-east of Ireland, he would have also found some useful 

 information. There is little use in taking the pains to publish 

 information if future writers ignore the labours of their pre- 

 decessors. — H. C. Hakt. 



NOTICES OF BOOKS. 



Fossil Botany, being an Introduction to Palceophytology from the stand- 

 point of the Botanist. By H. Graf zu Solms Laubach. 

 Translated by H. E. F. Garnsey, M.A. Eevised by I. B. 

 Balfour, F.R.S., Queen's Botanist in Scotland, &c. Oxford: 

 Clarendon Press. 1891. Pp. xii, 401, 49 cuts. Price 18s. 



The Clarendon Press have laid botanists under further obliga- 

 tions by the publication of another of their important translations 

 of standard German works on Botany. 



Count Solms Laubach, one of the most distinguished students 

 of the late Prof, de Bary, has succeeded him in the chair of 

 Botany in the University of Strasburg. In addition to his 

 numerous researches into various departments of recent botany, 

 it is well known that he has paid considerable attention to the 

 vegetation of past epochs of the earth's history. Great Britain 

 has been, to so large an extent, the field in which fossil botany 

 has been cultivated, and its strata have supplied so large a pro- 

 portion of the data on which our knowledge of extinct plants 

 has been founded, that Count Solms has visited most of our 

 plant-yielding localities, and acquired for himself a knowledge of 

 the fossils, and of the conditions under which they occur. Only 

 last year he made a long journey to the north of Scotland for the 

 purpose of inspecting the oolitic plant-beds of Cromarty, which 

 abound in the remains of interesting Cycadea, known to us chiefly 

 from the illustrations in Hugh Miller's Testimony of the Hocks. The 

 results of his studies in this country and on the Continent he 

 brought together in a series of University lectures delivered at 

 Gottingen some years ago. And these lectures, somewhat re- 

 modelled, were published by him in 1887 under the title of an 

 Introduction to Palceophytology. He employed the word Palceo- 

 phytology in a restricted sense, as he explains in his preface : 

 " It should mean," he says, " the knowledge of the old types of 

 vegetable forms as distinguished from the Angiosperms which made 

 their appearance in later times, and introduced the modern era." 

 This limitation — not very apparent in the German original — is lost 

 in the title Fossil Botany, adopted for the translation. Au<no- 

 spernis are excluded from the translation as they are from the 

 original work. 



An interesting introductory chapter is given dealing with the 

 conditions under which the remains of plants have been preserved 

 in the rocks. The cellular plants are necessarily disposed of in a 

 few pages, the Algie being the group that requires and receives most 



