﻿Geology and Natural History. 165 



A notable peculiarity of the Cape vegetation, which Mr. Bolus 

 dwells upon, is " its power to resist the aggression of foreign 

 invaders." Little over a dozen foreign weeds are sufficiently 

 abundant to attract attention, and most of these only within ten 

 miles of Cape Town, which has been a European settlement for 

 between three and four hundred years. In this respect it is most 

 unlike insular floras, and not very much less unlike that of Atlan- 

 tic North America ; the latter, however, largely on account of the 

 operations of man in the rapid conversion of forest into cultivated 

 fields. a. g. 



6. Descriptive Catalogue of the Gallery of Marianne North's 

 Paintings of Plants and their Homes, Poyal Gardens, JTevi. 

 Complied by W. Botting Hemsley, A.L.S. Fourth edition, 

 much enlarged. 1886. — Miss North's noble gift to Kew Gardens 

 is no small addition to the attractions of that great establishment, 

 and its scientific is not less than its popular interest. It consists, 

 besides the accessories, of between 800 and 900 paintings of 

 characteristic and striking plants of the principal extra-European 

 parts of the world, temperate and tropical, made from the life 

 and mostly in their native stations, and generally with some 

 representation of their surroundings. That a delicate lady should 

 have visited so many and such out-of-the-way parts of the world, 

 alone, undergoing various privations, in order to make these 

 paintings, is remarkable; that she should, at her own charges, 

 build an appropriate house for them, arrange them all, as it were, 

 with her own hand, and present the whole to the national estab- 

 lishment which they now adorn, is even more noteworthy. Kew 

 Gardens and the throng of visitors indeed have " reason to be 

 grateful for her fortitude as a traveler, her talent and industry 

 as an artist, and her liberality and public spirit." a. g. 



7. Official Guide to the Museums of Economic Botany, Royal 

 Gardens, Keio. — Of this we have now the " second edition, revis- 

 ed and augmented," of the No. 1, Dicotyledons and Gymnosperms, 

 filling 133 pages, the copious index included. It is so full of 

 interesting matter that the still unpublished part for the Mono- 

 cotyledons is all the more wished for. a. g. 



8. Filippo Parlatore, Flora Italiana, continuata da Teodoro 

 Cartjel. Vol. VI, Coralliflorce, p. iii. — This concluding part of 

 the sixth volume, carries on the work from the Scrophidariacem to 

 the JBorraginacece, the latter family and the Convolvidacew mak- 

 ing the principal bulk, although the Gentianaceai are not much 

 inferior in number of species. We note with regret a departure 

 from general and (as we had supposed) settled usage in respect 

 to generic names, namely, in the revival of Tournefortian names 

 which Linnaeus had superseded. For example we have Stramo- 

 nium Tourn., instead of Datura Linn., Pervinca Tourn., instead 

 of Vinca Linn. Consequently we have a set of new names, such 

 as Stramonium leve, S. fwtidum, etc., in compelete contravention 

 of all the long settled laws of nomenclature. When LinnaBus 

 established the binominal system under which Botany has flour- 



