434 The American Naturalist. [May, 
mixture of fact and fancy which the children of the near future are 
destined to read and pore over in their “ Nature Study.” The author 
well says, in her preface: “A child’s reading book, it seems to me, 
should secure for the child three things—practice in the art of reading, 
amusement and instruction.” She has certainly secured the first and 
second of these objects, and not a little of the third. Had she taken 
counsel of some good botanist her book might have been more instruct- 
ive and less misleading. Her description of the bean (on page 81) and 
her figure 88 are either absolutely incorrect, or, at the least, quite mis- 
leading. Similarly misleading is figure 119, the mistletoe (by which 
the author means the American mistletoe), for it illustrates not the 
American plant (Phoradendron) with which the child is supposed to 
be familiar, but the Europen (Visewm). Figure 136, which is said to 
show “a seed cut across, and so magnified that you can plainly see its 
many cells,” is a reduced copy of a figure in plate 80 in Grew’s Anat- 
omy of Plants, published in 1682! We can not blame old Nehemiah 
Grew for making such an inaccurate drawing: we may rather give 
him some praise for doing so well when we consider his tools and en- 
vironment, but certainly an author must be severely censured who, 
more than two hundred years later, reproduces it without saying a 
word as to its incorrectness. 
While much of the text is good, some of it is as bad as the cuts we 
have mentioned. The plant physiology is sometimes ridiculous, often 
worse, The chapter on “ How a Plant’s Food is Cooked,” is particu- 
larly bad. What can we say of a sentence like this: “ When the 
watery broth [in the leaves] is cooked in the sun, the heat of the sun’s 
rays causes the water to pass off through the little leaf-mouths!” Or 
of this: “ There is a tree, called the Eucalyptus, whose leaves perspire 
so freely that it is planted in swampy places in order to drain away 
the water!” 
Mrs. Dana writes so fluently that what she writes is likely to be 
read with pleasure, and it is her duty to attend much more carefully 
to her facts. This book must be revised before it can be commended 
as a reading hook for children—Caarues E. Bessey. 
