1893.] Recent Literature. 653 
RECENT LITERATURE. 
A Popular Botany.'—This pretty book professes to enable one 
who has never studied botany to have a “ bowing acquaintance” with 
the common wild flowers, certainly a most laudable undertaking. The 
author appears to have fallen largely under the baleful influence of 
the old-fashioned teachers of botany, characterized not inaptly by the 
line she quotes from Emerson— 
“And all their botany is Latin names” 
which may account for the impression she has that a scientific arrange- 
ment or even a “key ” must be repellant to the amateur, or “ bristling 
with technical terms and outlandish titles.’ This book is an honest 
effort to bring some knowledge of plants nearer to the non-botanical 
man and woman who may have a natural love of the flowers of the 
wayside and fields. 
At the opening of the book are a few pages devoted to the explana- 
tion of terms, in which we find what is so common in popular works— 
that many of the definitions do not define. There is a woful mixing 
up of physiological with structural definitions, which must prove as 
troublesome to the amateur who has a horror of technical terms which 
“ bristle,” or of titles which are “outlandish.” How much help will 
the reader get from this definition ?—" The Stamens are the fertilizing 
organs of the flower.” Some of the definitions are good enough, and 
will, perhaps, serve their purpose. : 
The “Flower Descriptions” are grouped under six heads, viz.: 
White, Yellow, Pink, Red, Blue and Purple, Miscellaneous. This part 
is pretty well done, and includes descriptions and many good illustra- 
tions of the more striking common flowers of the region within one or 
two hundred miles of New York City. The provincialism of the book 
is shown in its title, where the-flowers of this limited region are called 
“our common wild flowers,” and again on page X, where we find the 
expression, “ this side of Chicago,” which makes one ask where is “ this 
side?” The title should be changed so as to restrict the book to the 
New England and Middle States, in which region it will be a useful 
book for amateurs. The author should remember .that there are 
“ common wild flowers” and multitudes of people who admire them in 
the South, upon the prairies and plains, in the Rocky Mountains, and 
in the States of the Pacific Coast. “Our common wild flowers” is an 
1 « How to Know the Wild Flowers." A guide to the names, haunts, and habits 
of our common wild flowers, by Mrs. William Starr Dana; illustrated by Marion 
Satterlee ; small, 8vo, 298 pp. New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893. 
