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Practical Botany. This first half contains the morphology, the 

 intimate structure of plants, and the classification of plants, 

 beginning with the Thallophyta and including the whole of the 

 Cryptogams, leaving the Flowering Plants and Physiology, it is to 

 be presumed, to the second half. The adoption of this sequence 

 of parts may be the outcome of deliberation or of mere expediency, — 

 it matters little, since no one is likely to take the book as a reading 

 task from cover to cover; and an index to the whole, which is 

 promised with the second half, will do away with any inconvenience 

 that might otherwise have arisen from sandwiching classification 

 between anatomy and physiology. 



The older British text- books richly deserved the reproaches fre- 

 quently cast at them by their victims and by members of the public 

 whom they repelled from the sacrifice. With the renaissance of the 

 study in this country begun by the publication of the translation of 

 Sachs' Lehrbuch, there was a dawn of hope that Botany was about 

 to become clothed with a living interest, and that learning it was to 

 resemble less and less an obstacle race. Numbers of botanists 

 have gone on thinking so to this day, but a rude awakening is in store. 

 The primrose path has led to an everlasting bonfire of such hopes. 

 While Prof. Vines' s book abounds in excellences of order and 

 accuracy and judicious inclusion and exclusion — is in other respects 

 all that was expected, — it is simply clogged with terminology, and in 

 places resembles more an ingenious attempt to weave into sentences 

 a dictionary of botanical terms than a plain account of facts and 

 opinions which after all is the aim. I have not a spark of sympathy 

 with those who grumble loudly against the evils of terminology. That 

 a complicated terminology is no great deterrent from learning is 

 proved by the experiences of those who learn seamanship or dress- 

 making, which both abound, especially the former, in strictly 

 technical terms. The topographical anatomy of the rigging of a 

 full-rigged ship and the physiology of its functions which are the 



natical character. But the " stickit sailor," as he is 

 described in seaports is not a product of nautical terminology, though 

 he may be the object of illegitimate portions of it. Without sharing 

 then such objections to a fairly copious use of terminology, I confess 

 to a disappointment with the abuse of it in this book, and the dis- 

 appointment is the more keen that the book is otherwise so good. 

 There is really no reason why botany should not be written about 

 and taught to students, elementary or advanced, in other than the 

 English language with botanical terms interspersed. Portions of 

 this book are written in a botanical language connected by English 

 perhaps an evil outcome of feeding c 



able to give the most sincere commendation t 

 of the Text-book. It would be absurd to suppose that a teacher who 

 has reared more botanists of brilliant performance than any other 

 one now living in this country, could do otherwise than write a 



