No. 376.] REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 285 
tive to the general reader. Albeit some of these have contained a 
good many questionable statements, they have all ministered more 
or less directly to an increasing popular demand for simple, non- 
technical presentations of scientific themes. During the same time 
there have been many attempts to prepare text-books of botany for 
common schools and grammar and high schools, the aim of each 
being to combine simplicity with exactness of statement. Some of 
these books have been very good, but none of them have occupied 
quite the field of the one before us. 
This book occupies a sort of middle ground. It is not strictly a 
botany, at least not in the old technical sense, but rather a delightful 
book about plants,—a series of nature studies designed to interest 
all sorts of people, old and young, teachers, preachers, laymen, and 
students. Mothers who wish to teach their children something about 
plants and do not know how to begin will find this book very useful. 
The same may be said of a large class of teachers in our public 
schools. At the same time, it will prove a pleasant companion for 
persons who are neither parents, teachers, nor botanists, but who 
have a leisure hour now and then for rambles and wish to know 
something about the plants they meet. : 
The first sentence of the introduction sets the pace for the whole 
book: “ Plants are among the most informal of objects, but botany 
is popularly understood to be one of the most formal of the natural 
sciences. ‘This is only another way of saying that plant study is not 
always taught by a natural method.” 
The book is exceedingly attractive in appearance and a perusal of 
its contents in no way lessens the first impression. It is interesting 
from beginning to end, even to a professional botanist, who might be 
pardoned some weariness over details of things long familiar. The 
aim of the book is to cultivate the reader’s faculty for observation 
and his ability to reason correctly on what he has seen. Some of its 
suggestive statements will bear quotation: “ The lesson to be derived 
from this discussion is not what particular interpretation has been 
placed upon certain facts, but that there is endless variety, and that 
every fact and phenomenon must be investigated for itself.” Again: 
“In making such studies as those recommended in the last paragraph, 
both teacher and pupil should consider that mere identification is not 
the end to be sought. It is always a satisfaction to know the names 
by W.S. Holdsworth, Assistant Professor of Drawing in the Agricultural College 
of Michigan. Macmillan, New York, 1898. xxxi + 491 pp., with 446 illustra- 
tions. 
