532 The American Naturalist. [June, 
(2) Secondary deposits consisting of asphaltum, have a vertical 
range from Miocene to Pleistocene. (Calif. State Min. Bur. Bull. 11, 
[1896] 1897). 
BOTANY. 
A Scientific Dictionary of Plants.—Of unscientific diction- 
aries of plants we have had many, but at last we have one which may 
be consulted without fear by the scientific botanist. It is so useful that 
we may well call attention to it here. Its author, J. C. Willis, is the 
Director of the Royal Botanic Garden in Ceylon, and the book, which 
he calls “A Manual and Dictionary of the Flowering Plants and 
Ferns,” is the outgrowth of his experience in garden, museum and field. 
In the first volume are given summaries of Morphology, Ecology, the 
Principles of Classification, Geographical Distribution, and Economie 
Botany. The second volume, which is double the size of the first, con- 
sists of an alphabetical arrangement of classes, orders and genera, each 
with valuable descriptive and numerical data. 
In the preparation of the work the author has made use of Engler 
and Prantl’s Pflanzenfamilien, thus insuring a modern treatment. The 
fact that it is brought out by the Cambridge University Press as 
one of the Cambridge Natural Science Manuals, is a sufficient guaran- 
tee of the mechanical excellence of the work. 
—Cuarrs E. Bessey. 
Order and Family in Botany.—It has been a well-recognized 
law in Zoology that “Family” is a subdivision of “ Order,” and in 
many botanical publications an effort has been made to recognize the 
same relation. It is very unfortunate that in the ordinary English 
books both of these terms have been applied to the same groups. Thus 
we have Order Ranunculacee and Family Ranunculacee, Order Com- 
posite and Family Composite. Here we throw away a much needed 
group-term, and are obliged to bring in the term “ Cohort” to replace 
it, to say nothing of “ Series” and “ Division.” Some of the German 
botanists have wisely followed the zoological practice of using “ Order” 
for a group above “ Family.” Thus Luerssen (Handbuch der System- 
atischen Botanik), Sachs (Text-book of Botany), Goebel ( Outlines of 
Classification and Special Morphology of Plants), Schumann (Lehrbuch 
1 Edited by Prof. C. E. Bessey, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska. 
