382 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



NOTICE OF BOOK. 



i 



d. By Henry John Elwes, 

 M.A. Edinburgh : Privately 



Printed. Vols. I. & II. : 1906-7. Price £3 3s. each. 



These handsome volumes, the result of much knowledge and 

 investigation, provoke a feeling of regret that, being in many 

 respects so good, they should not have been better. The authors 

 have spared neither trouble nor expense ; they have brought 

 together a vast amount of information, much of it, in Dr. Henry's 

 portion, hitherto unpublished ; the work is well printed on good 

 paper ; the plates are numerous — sixty to each volume — and well 

 chosen. And yet it must be said that, for want it would seem of 

 a little consultation with folk versed in the arts of book-arrange- 

 ment and book-production, the volumes as a whole distinctly fall 

 short of the comparative perfection which they might easily have 

 attained. 



There is only one work with which this can fairly be com- 

 pared, and that is Prof. Sargent's admirable Silva of North 

 America. With such a model before them, it is difficult to under- 

 stand why Mr. Elwes and Dr. Henry departed from it ; for wher- 

 ever they have done so it has been a departure for the worse. 

 Prof. Sargent's book is arranged systematically ; each description 

 begins with a brief diagnosis, followed by a full bibliography : 

 then comes a detailed description, with copious footnotes on the 

 early history of the species, with incidental references to points of 

 interest connected with structure, fertilization, and other matters, 

 and, when the name is commemorative, a short but excellent bio- 

 graphy of the person commemorated ; each volume contains an 

 excellent index. Mr. Elwes and Dr. Henry adopt no kind of 

 arrangement — the first four genera treated are Fag us, Ailanthus, 

 Sophora, and Arancaria ; there is no index to the volumes, and 

 the table of contents is not arranged alphabetically, so that one 

 must run through it in order to know what is and is not in the 

 book : even species belonging to the same genus appear in 

 different volumes. The authors might at least, by beginning each 

 genus on a right-hand page, have afforded purchasers an oppor- 

 tunity of arranging the work for binding in systematic order, but 

 this has not been done. The bibliography is comparatively poor ; 

 the descriptions are full and doubtless excellent, the distribution is 

 very well done, and there is ample evidence of a wide acquaintance 

 with the literature of the subject ; but we miss the miscellaneous 

 but always pertinent notes which give an air of completeness to 

 Prof. Sargent's work. 



The care in small details which adds so much to the appear- 

 ance of a book is manifest in the typographical arrangements, 

 as well as in numberless small points which catch the eye on 

 every page: e.g. " var. Fhridana (Tax us florid ana)" (i. 100)— the 

 same name cannot correctly have a capital and a small initial ; 

 " Schl." (p. 101) is not a correct abbreviation for Schlechtendahl, 

 nor is it right to cite " Schlechtendahl, Linnaa"— it should be 



