214 THE FLORIST AND 
In Botany we have no such book ; nor, as far as we have seen, in any 
other department of science, save perhaps Natural Philosophy, where 
" Parker's Elements" presents an approximation to our standard, worthy of 
being studied by all writers of scientific " class-books for academies and 
common schools." 
The wood cuts . are well selected. We do not, however, recognize the 
claimed advantage of devoting special pages to them. It were certainly 
better and more convenient to insert them among the letter-press, and then 
the necessity for publishing the book in an unwieldy quarto form would 
be superseded. 
The second part, or Systematic Botany, by Joseph "W. Congdbn, occupies 
the last one hundred and twenty pages of the work. It contains descrip- 
tions of the wild and many of the cultivated plants of New York and the 
Eastern States, but is not so valuable for this latitude as the Floras of 
Gray, Darlington, and Wood. The arrangement is after the natural 
system, and an attempt is made to group the orders, but no definition of 
the characters common to the members of each group is given. Each of 
the important orders is illustrated by a good wood cut of one or more of 
the prominent genera composing it. We would suggest, however, to pub- 
lishers and authors, that to incur the expense of a wood cut, giving the 
general physiognomy of a flowering twig of the Rose, or Honeysuckle, or 
the stem of a Pink, is unnecessary. Their prominent external characters 
are familiar to all observers. Let the cuts of the orders to which those 
plants belong, represent the floral structure, a simple section, or, better 
still, a complete dissection of a flower of each of the genera'aforesaid, and 
while the cost will be about the same, the value of the illustration will be 
universally recognized. The paper and typography is excellent, of course ; 
Messrs. Appleton being the publishers. A. L. K. 
THE CACTUS FAMILY.* 
Among the numerous families which compose the yegetable kingdom, 
there is none which presents at the same time such anomalous, such strange, 
and at the same time so very curious forms, as the family of Cacti. An 
observer, acccustomed to the elegant regularity of the vegetable forms of 
our forests^ to the luxuriance and noble dimensions of those of tropical 
* From the Manual of the Amateur of Cacti, by Charles Lemaire. 
