100 
THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
living botanical literature of the future, therefore, it seetns 
to us, is likely to be concerned more with the activities 
and structure of plants, than with any records of their 
distribution and al)undance. 
BOOKS AND WRITERS. 
The days of species-making in the best sense of that 
term seem to have forever passed. The plants of most 
parts of the world are now^ fairh^ well known and while 
w'e shall continue to discover occasional species new to 
science, we may begin to sum up the relationships of those 
already in hand. It is astonishing how rapidlv our ideas 
of such relationships have changed in the past two 
decades. Less than a score of years ago it was the 
custom in books devoted to systematic botany to sand- 
wach the pines and their allies in somew^here between the 
oaks and palms, but no author of the present day would 
think of doing so. Our ideas of classification have 
steadily gained in clearness and have made possible such 
a work as that of Alfred B. Rendle's on *'The Classifica- 
tion of Flowering Plants." The first volume of this work, 
recentl^^ issued, discusses the classification of the Gymno- 
sperms and Monocotyledons and will prove of interest to 
all students of plants w^hose interest in the subject extends 
beyond that sort of classification of plants that consists 
merely in pulling the flowers to pieces in order to learn 
their names. Beginning with an historical introduction 
the book proceeds to discuss the Gymnosperms, both 
living and fossil, each group coming in for an adequate 
review^ of their salient characteristics. Tables of the 
orders, families and genera with their distribution are 
given. Following this the Monocotyledons are treated 
in the same thorough manner. Especial attention is 
given to such subjects as methods of polhnation, habit, 
habitat and distribution. It may be noted that the 
author uses Order in the sense that American writers use 
Family. Nearly two hundred excellent illustrations add 
to the interest of the four hundred pages of text. (New 
York, The MacMillan Co., 1904.) 
