BOOK REVIEWS. 



245 



science. The insects and fungi most frequently met with are dealt 

 with, and appropriate methods of treatment are detailed. The 

 illustrations also are most useful in elucidating the text, and are well 

 reproduced. One little point perhaps deserves a note. While it 

 is quite true that peas, like other leguminous plants, are independent 

 of supplies of nitrogen from nitrates and salts of ammonia in the 

 soil, yet it not infrequently happens that better crops and more 

 abundant yields are obtained in the garden after the use of organic 

 manures such as farmyard manure than without this aid. This is 

 largely due, no doubt, to the water-holding capacity of these substances, 

 and perhaps also to the stimulative effect of some substances of which 

 we at present know little, formed as a result of the decomposition 

 of the manure. This of course the pea participates in as well as other 

 plants, and this also probably explains the greater value of farmyard 

 manure over the chemical manures alone with which every grower 

 is familiar in practice. 



N School Gardening, with a Guide to Horticulture." By A. Hosking. 

 8vo. xi -f 326 pp. (University Tutorial Press, London, 1912.) 3s. 6d. 



Sixty-eight pages of this little book are devoted to the school 

 garden, the remainder deal with gardening, and no doubt will be 

 useful to teachers in school gardens, to cottage gardeners, and others. 

 A considerable amount of useful advice on the starting and main- 

 tenance of a garden is given in the opening chapters with plans 

 and systems of cropping. The chapter on correlation with other school 

 subjects should also prove useful and suggestive. We could wish 

 the sample note-books had shown a little more detail of how things 

 noted were done, and still more of why they were done. 



There are so many useful books on gardening now, and scarcely 

 any dealing at all well with school gardening, that we could have wished 

 the author had devoted more space to the main subject of his book as 

 indicated in the title and less to the " guide to horticulture." No 

 fewer than fifty pages are devoted to lists of plants — few of which can 

 possibly find room in a school garden, and much of these, at least, 

 might have given place to a fuller account of the working of a school 

 garden. 



"Elementary Biology: Plant, Animal, Human." By J. E. 

 Peabody, A.M., and A. E. Hunt, Ph.B. 8vo. xxi + 170 + 194 -f 229 pp. 

 (Macmillan, New York, 1913.) 5s. 6d. net. 



Most books on elementary biology take the theme of morpho- 

 logical relationships. This differs from them in having as its central 

 idea the functions of living things, considering the form in relation 

 to these functions, and the effect of their performance upon human 

 life and surroundings. This, it seems to us, is the proper standpoint 

 from which to view the subject in a school course ; it makes it at once 



