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NOTICES OF BOOKS. 



Handbook of the Aniaryllidea, including the AMrcemericm and Agave®. 



By J. G. Baker, F.K.S. London : Bell & Sons. 8vo, pp. xii. 

 216. Price 5s. 



The indefatigable Mr. Baker gives us here another of those 

 systematic treatises by which he has done so much to bring into 

 a handy and useable form the scattered observations and descrip- 

 tions of various writers. To the readers of this Journal this work 

 needs neither introduction nor recommendation, for some of the 

 most useful of Mr. Baker's papers, as well as part of the present 

 volume, have appeared first in these pages. 



In the present work, Mr. Baker has " attempted to furnish 

 cultivators and botanists with a compact working handbook, of 

 which the main part consists of characters of genera and species, 

 drawn up from actual specimens." The material on which the 

 descriptions are based includes all the AmarylUdea which have 

 passed through the author's hands during his twenty- three years at 

 Kew, supplemented by an examination of dried specimens of nearly 

 all the species of the order. Their bibliography and pre-Linnean 

 history is left on one side, so that we have here, as Mr. Baker 

 describes it, " a compact working handbook," 



We are sorry that Mr. Baker has followed Bentham and Hooker 

 in adopting Amaryllidea rather than Amaryllidacem as the name of 

 the order : as a consequence, the first suborder takes the title 

 Amaryllea. Sixty-one genera and about 670 species are admitted, 

 many of the latter being here first described. Several hybrid 

 Narcissi are here first named, and among the hybrids are placed 

 sundry plants described as species by earlier writers, such as .V. 

 orientalis L., N. MacleaU Lindl., and N. pocuii/onnis Salisb. 

 Leucojum vernum is not recognised as British. Recent Cape 

 collectors seem still to have doue very little for OethylUs : of the 

 nine species described, six have not been collected since the time 

 of Thunberg and Mas son. There are interesting and useful notes 

 on the hybrids of Hippeastnun, Criniuii, and Serine. Anew genus, 

 <trickUoidia, is established for the plant which Mr. Baker had 

 previously referred to Leperiza and Stenomesson, and which is placed 

 in the ' Genera Plantarum ' under Ph&dramma, from which "it dif- 

 fers by its monadelphous filaments." The citation of ■ Nichols. Diet. 

 Oard.' as the authority for certain names of plants fi st referred to 

 their genera (in accordance with Bentham and Hooker) by Mr. 

 Nicholson, m his ' Dictionary of Gardening,' will serve to remind 

 folk that this work must not be overlooked in matters relating to 

 synonymy. Alstrcemeria is spelt Alstrameria, we suppose by inad- 

 vertence ; although this spelling is adhered to throughout the body 

 of the book ; it is correctly given in the Index. 



The volume is, as we have said, a most useful and indeed 

 indispensable handbook to the family of which it treats : and Mr. 

 Baker deserves and will receive the thanks of botanists and 

 cultivators for this last addition to his monographs : to the latter 

 class of workers it will prove perhaps the most useful of any, con- 



