(PEP a yen © ea 
oe ee ee ee ee eee 
Botany. 177 
don. Its a is interesting and truly noteworthy. It tells 
how “ Vegetation in any given spot maintains its own only by 
ae so all along eo time, and under all changes of climate, 
land and sea. It pictures the great hosts of plants oscillating be- 
friction attendant on thsi movemat, which has extinguished 
perhaps whole battalions. It takes a general survey of the promi- 
nent characteristics of the great floras, northern, southern and 
tropical, and of their principal divisions. It brings prominently 
forward “the o inion ime the northern hemisphere has oe 
mR 
the tropics] than in a reverse direction at proposition (based 
ou the temperate floras) is well sustained by obvious facts, 
follows almost of course pitas t reater rates an pin 
correct in their ordinal ian ons, the reverse might well 
have been the case at earlier periods, when Proteacez and Laurinee 
abounded in northern temperate regions. It must needs have been 
so if there was for any long Pattee a preponderance of southern 
land with northward extensior 
A good part of the mrad rich in practical value as the re- 
mainder is in theoretical interest—recounts what geographical ex- 
plorers have recently been doing for botany by imac mate- 
rials and information, indicates how very much is yet to be done 
: this way, how easy it is to collect and ss botanical speci- 
mens, and what important services the “ roving Englishman” and 
still more the desciplined explorer, may wendey to the botanical 
— es, A. G 
Conspectus Flore Europe, auctore C. F. Nyman. Orelso 
ie 1878. I. Ranunculacee—Pomacee, pp. 240, 8vo.—This 
systematic catalogue of European plants, ai uch in the Candol- 
lean order, with leading ri ee Spm synonyms, and local- 
che. supplies a desiderat , so far as it extends, and the second 
rt, which will include the sessinias Polypeta ale, i is announced 
m in press. It is evidently a work of critical —— — is 
well arranged. 
- Botanical Necrology of 1878.—An —— number of bot- 
anists have deceased in the course of = past year. The first and 
the last names on the list are venera 
Ettas Magnus Frins, of Upsal, died February 8, 1878, in the 
eighty-fourth year of his age, a month after the hu ndredth anni- 
versary of the death of Linneus at that ancient University. 
