REVIEWS AND EXCHANGES 
175 
School Gardening for Little Children. By Lucy R. Latter. With an Intro- 
duction by Prof. Patrick Geddes. Swan, Sonnenschein and Co. Price 
2s. 6d. net. 
This is an eminently practical guide-book for teachers in kindergartens and 
schools for little children, by a writer who knows from personal experience what 
she is writing about. It teaches the proper standpoint : it furnishes complete, 
practicable and simple plans of work ; and it also gives plentiful lists of books 
for further information. We cordially recommend it to all teachers in such 
schools, whether in country or in town. 
Our School Out-of- Doors : a Nature Book for Young People. By the Hon. M. 
Cordelia Leigh. T. Fisher Unwin. Second Edition. Price 2s. 
“ The writer supposes the teacher to be taking the scholars for a country walk 
twice a month throughout the year,” and the book is itself apparently meant as 
a “ reader ” between whiles. It covers a wide field, protective colouring, clouds, 
snow-crystals, the physiology of crops, mosses, tadpoles, fins, “composites,” 
insect-pollination, wings, the life-cycles of insects, worms and their work, &c., 
and for the most part covers it well. It may be doubted whether it is well to 
talk to children of the “ atmosphere,” the “ ether,” “nitrates and phosphates,” 
“ cartilage ” and “tissues”; while it is quite certain that the Lesser Celandine 
is not the “ pillwort,” that the “gems” of mosses are not “cells,” or the 
“spikes” of the gorse “ hardened leaves.” The information is sometimes laid 
on too thickly, as in the following passage : “ More than 100,000 of these little 
mouths have been counted in one leaf of an apple tree. The leaves are eaten 
by horses, cows, sheep and goats. A yellow dye is made from the bark.” After 
this comes Glastonbury and pomatum, all in one half-page 1 
Insect Pests of the Farm and Garden. By F. Martin Duncan. Swan Sonnen- 
schein and Co. (The Naturalists’ Library). Price 2 S. 6d. net. 
In this business-like little work, by one who bears a name honoured in the 
annals of Natural History, we have what appears to us to be the first volume of 
a new series ; and we can only prophesy that, if the succeeding volumes are as 
good, they are likely to meet with wide acceptance. After a general account of 
the structure and classification of the Arthropoda, the author gives a chapter on 
insecticides, and then describes upwards of forty kinds of pests seriatim, treating 
of their life-histories and modes of attacks, and of the remedies against them. 
Photographic illustrations of most of these pests are given, so that the book is 
one well adapted for the use of the farmer, the amateur gardener, or the beginner 
in an agricultural or horticultural school. 
The Hampstead Garner. Compiled by A. M. C. With a Preface by Clement 
Shorter. Elliot Stock. Price 3s. 6d. net. 
We confess to being somewhat disappointed in “The Hampstead Garner.” 
True, it contains dainty sonnets by Leigh Hunt; and, perhaps, nearly every 
actual mention of the place in English poetry ; but it also contains much that is 
only connected with Hampstead by the fact that the writer visited that “ Northern 
Height,” and most of its contents are the merest scraps. We looked for an 
anthology and found a birthday-book. 
Plants and their Ways in South Africa. By Bertha Stoneman. I.ongmans, 
Green and Co. Price 3s. 6d. 
In 1869, Professor Daniel Oliver adapted his “ Elementary Lessons in Botany,” 
for the use of residents in India. Similarly, Mr. Edmonds’s “ Elementary 
Botany” has been adapted for South Africa, and Professor G. Henslow, a casual 
visitor, has provided an excellent introductory work for the same colonies in his 
“South African Flowering Plants,” which we reviewed not long since. It is, 
however, an excellent sign of the sound direction which science-teaching is taking 
in this distant land, that we have in this work the production of a teacher resident 
on the spot. The examples are thus all taken from plants which will be familiar 
to the pupil, whilst the teacher’s own outlook upon the plant world has gained a 
freshness which is absent from books originally written in Europe. Many of the 
chapters, such as “ A Study of Leaves,” “ Waterways in Plants,” “ The Food- 
making of Plants,” and “ Plant Defences,” are admirable; but in those meant 
for reading-lessons, which are, perhaps, a mistake in principle, and in some 
