WILD FLOWERS AT HOME AND ABROAD. 131 
no reader of Nature Notes can doubt ; their admirers claim 
as many pages as are occupied by all the other branches of 
natural history combined, and the literature devoted to recording 
their ways seems inexhaustible. But flowers hold their own 
when we are travelling from place to place. Even if we remain 
in England, the varying flora of different localities affords more 
than sufficient interest ; while the fortunate visitor to the Swiss 
mountains is almost overwhelmed with the abundance and 
variety of the exquisite wild flowers which meet him at every 
turn. 
The taste for natural history being fortunately, in spite of 
occasional statements to the contrary, very widespread among 
us, it is natural that it should have produced a crop of literature 
bearing on the subject, and that among this crop, as among 
others, there should be a considerable proportion of weeds. 
Leaving out of consideration the technical floras, such as those 
of Babington, Bentham, and Hooker, and having nothing but 
praise to bestow upon such books as Mrs. Kitchener’s A Year's 
Botany, it must be confessed that popular books on wild flowers 
.are often at best feeble and unhelpful, and at worst positively 
misleading. Mr. Step has taken a step in advance — the pun is 
unintentional — with his little volume on Wayside and Woodland 
Blossoms, the worst part of which is its title, which, we confess, 
somewhat prejudiced us against the book, especially when our 
eye fell on an advertisement among the same publishers’ 
“ Useful Manuals for Lovers of Nature,” of the very worst book 
on “ English Wild Flowers” which has ever been written. 
Mr. Step has not produced a model popular flora, but he 
has given us in small compass a great deal of useful informa- 
tion, much of which we look for in vain in any other work of 
the kind. By the rigid exclusion of scraps of poetry, fragments 
of quotations (usually at third-hand) from Gerard, and the like, 
Mr. Step has been able, between the covers of this very conve- 
nient-sized volume, to include references to the many points of 
interest connected with our common plants to which Mr. Darwin 
was the first to call attention. Thus, in the first twelve pages, we 
find under the Cowslip an account of dimorphic flowers and their 
significance, under the Violet and Broom details of their fertili- 
zation, under the Woodsorrel a notice of the “ cleistogamous ” 
flowers (already duly noted in the Violet) : and this method of 
giving recent information in a simple, pleasant, and accurate 
manner is kept up throughout the book. The result is that the 
intelligent learner acquires almost insensibly an amount of 
knowledge regarding the life-history of our common plants, for 
which he will look in vain in many more pretentious publica- 
tions. The treatment of fertilization is especially full ; Mr. Step 
has condensed the best observations into small compass, and 
his little volume is, as we have already said, greatly in advance 
of every previous undertaking. It will add very slightly to the 
bulk of the most restricted arrangement of luggage, and forms 
an admirable pocket companion for the lover of wild flowers. 
