No. 400] REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 335 
BOTANY. 
The Cyclopedia of American Horticulture.' — It has been the 
dream of years with Professor Bailey of Cornell to close the nine- 
teenth century with a comprehensive index to American horticulture, 
viewing plants from the garden rather than the herbarium, and con- 
sidering them as living, growing, varying things rather than biblio- 
graphical formule. To this end he spent a year in indexing all of the 
prominent American plant and seed catalogues, as a preliminary 
step, and then enlisted the interest and services of a large number 
of artists, expert gardeners and botanists, with whose coóperation he 
now has the work so well in hand that the first of the four volumes 
of which it is to consist is given to the public with the promise that 
the others shall be issued before the end of the year. 
The volume already published, covering the initials 4 to D, is a 
quarto of over 500 pages, illustrated by a number of full-page plates, 
and nearly 800 cuts in the text; and, as is the plan of the entire 
work, is made first hand, from original sources of information, the 
botanical matter nearly all newly elaborated from the living plants, 
and the cultural directions often repeated by several growers experi- 
enced in methods adapted to American conditions. The editor 
very modestly says that he considers his book only a beginning, 
bringing together scattered data as a foundation for other studies. 
It is sufficient to say that it is well written, well printed, and, though 
unequally so, well illustrated. 
The botanical treatment of so large and shifting a subject as the 
plants cultivated in a given country is a matter of some interest. 
Florists’ and gardeners’ varieties, because of their very transient 
nature and great number, are not characterized nor even enumerated, 
though the types under which they may be grouped are considered 
in the more popular genera of the moment. But the species and 
more permanent varieties are systematically handled, and the very 
real objection, that the systematic treatment of the plants grown in a 
single country deals with too shifting a quantity to have value of 
any permanence, is to a certain extent met by the introduction under 
the more important genera of supplementary lists of species which 
should be, or are likely to be, elements of our trade. 
Nomenclature in botany is sufficiently difficult and complex to 
! Bailey, L. H., and Miller, Wilhelm. Cyclopedia of American Horticulture. 
New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900. 
