*>14 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Miall would not allow any papers to be read before the club ; the effect of 

 reading papers on the listeners " is melancholy beyond the power of words 

 to describe. No assembly of free agents can be kept together on such 

 terms. I will go a step further and add, let there be no lectures, as a rule. 

 Now and then, I admit, it may be stimulating to hear some naturalist of 

 experience discourse, but even he is generally tedious. Let no local lists 

 be prepared, read, or printed. They are hardly ever worth the paper they 

 are printed on." He then goes on to describe how they " maintained a 

 useful and agreeable college natural history club for several years with- 

 out papers, lectures, or local lists. This style of natural history club may 

 do very well at the University of Leeds, where it appears to form more of 

 a class than a society, but it is very questionable whether ordinary Natural 

 History Societies could be worked on those lines. Professor Miall's experi- 

 ences must have been peculiarly unfortunate, and it is not likely that 

 many will be found to endorse his views on this subject. These studies are 

 written in the author's particularly lucid style, and besides the information 

 which they contain they are valuable for the suggestive way in which the 

 matter is brought before the reader, which must conduce to its further 

 consideration. Every one who is interested in the study of nature should 

 take an opportunity of reading this book. 



"English Estate Forestry." By A. C. Forbes. 8vo., 332 pp. 

 (Edward Arnold, London.) 12s. 6d. net. 



This is an instructive and well -written book on forestry matters 

 generally, though, as the author says in his preface, it contains little that 

 is new. However, the contents of each of the thirteen chapters into 

 which the work is divided have a genuine ring about them, and clearly 

 point out that the author has a good practical knowledge of forest opera- 

 tions generally and knows well what he is writing about. Regarding the 

 Japanese Larch (page 96), it is by no means exempt from the attacks of 

 Peziza Wilkommi, for we know a wood in Gloucestershire in which this 

 tree has suffered severely from this scourge of our Larch plantations. 

 Surely the yield of timber of the Douglas Fir (page 38) is much under- 

 estimated at 1 foot per year, as at Penrhyn Castle, in Wales, we have 

 measured trees which showed an increment of nearly 5 cubic feet annually 

 for fifty years. The author does well in the second chapter to draw 

 attention to the absurd practice of leaving the management of wood- 

 lands in the hands of the estate agent. As we have frequently pointed 

 out, the estate carpenter, gardener, or farm bailiff is too often placed in 

 management of woods and plantations, a practice that has been fraught 

 with very serious results in both an ornamental and an economic sense. 



"The Cultivation and Preparation of Para Rubber." By W. H. 

 Johnson, F.L.S. 8vo., 99 pp. (Crosby Lockwood, London.) 7s. Qd. net. 



Rubber, or caoutchouc, has an interesting history in that it was 

 discovered some 400 years ago, while later, in 1770, it was recommended 

 for erasing lead pencil marks, and half a century later was used by 

 Macintosh in the manufacture of waterproof garments. But in our own 



