618 The American Naturalist. [July, 
The book thus emphasizes the principle that botany is the study of 
plants, not the study of books. Books, however, are not to be ignored 
or neglected, and short lists of desirable reference books are given. It 
is significant of the spirit of the book that it is only “ when the student 
shall have finished a careful study of the morphology of the more con- 
spicuous plants, and has seen some of the more important modifications 
of the different organs, to perform different services to the plant,” that 
the author suggests the use of “a suitable manual of the botany of the 
region, from which the name and relationships of the species may be 
obtained.” But even after this cautious suggestion of the use of a 
manual, the author is constrained to say that “the name should not be , 
the end for which the work is done,” and “ the teacher should prevent 
this searching out of the name and the practice in the use of the analy- 
tical key from absorbing the principal portion of the attention.” Thus, 
although the book is distinctly “ phanerogamous,” it is as emphatically 
a laboratory manual, as any of the text-books devoted to the minute 
anatomy of plants. 
The last stronghold of the old time text-book botanists is thus 
assaulted from an unexpected quarter. Hitherto they have been able 
to defend themselves with more or less success by crying out against 
early study by the pupil of small and little known things, as cells, 
nuclei, green slimes, pond scums, etc. (characterized by one educator 
as “ recondite ”), and making a great ado over the difficulty (some- 
times asserted to be an impossibility) of supplying the secondary 
schools with compound microscopes. Professor Setchell has turned 
flowering plant botany into a laboratory study, and has done so with- 
_ out bringing in anything more recondite than seeds and embryos, or 
more difficult of purchase than pocket lenses and dissecting needles. 
It would be easy to find faults in this book (what book on botany is 
free from them?) but we feel that it is likely to do so much good in 
certain quarters that we will say no more than that in our opinion ele- 
mentary botany should include a good deal about the simpler forms of 
plants, so that the pupil may obtain some idea of types. It is as go 
a principle in botany as in mathematics, that we must begin with sim- 
ple things and proceed to the complex, in order to understand the lat- 
ter. Then again we know from many years of personal experience, 
and this not in an old and wealthy community, that the purchase of good 
compound microscopes (duty free), and the installation of small but 
efficient laboratories in secondary schools, is as easily accomplished for 
botany as is the purchase of necessary apparatus and the fitting up of 
proper laboratories for chemistry. In the new state of Nebraska 
