January 18, 1883. ] JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 57 
the origination of the Crystal Palace Dahlia Show, and whose 
health had for years been feeble, died before he was able to see 
the accomplishment of the work he had undertaken. The death 
of Mr. Robert Osborn, the last member of his family, at an early 
age, led to the breaking-up of one of the old historic nurseries 
of the metropolis—Osborn’s of Fulham ; and so has followed, 
although from a different cause, in the wake of Gleudinning’s of 
Chiswick and Roili- son’s of Tooting. One does not like to miss 
these old familiar names who did real and good service to the 
cause of horticulture in days gone by ; and amongst horticulturists 
all over England there was no name that stood higher for probity 
and honourable dealing than that of Osborn of Fulham. 
Such are some of the points which have presented themselves 
to me in connection with the past year. Looking at it in a horti¬ 
cultural point of view there is nothing to discourage and much 
to encourage us in our onlook. Never was the love of flowers so 
great amongst us as it is now ; and although, as is usual, there are 
some eccentricities, yet on the whole taste is, I think, improving. 
Less and less grow the polychrome beds of colour of the bedding- 
out system ; more numerous become the herbaceous beds and 
borders. Oid-fashioned flowers are once more in favour. We go 
into gardens now where we can catch the delicious fragrance of 
the Sweet Pea, Mignonette, or Lavender ; and although there 
are some who are inclined to ride this hobby to death, yet on the 
whole horticulture is vastly benefited by the change. May all the 
readers of the Journal have a good time in their several depart¬ 
ments in the year on which we have now entered.—D., Deal. 
RICHARDIAS. 
The glowing accounts of the grand successes of our great plant- 
growers cause their less fortunate brethren to heave many a sigh. 
They eagerly read such accounts in search of cultural details that 
may lead them to a similar result. I have experienced this 
myself in reading the pages of the Journal, which I have done 
for twenty years, and it is pleasant to succeed in accomplishing 
an object. I have lately read a paragraph by one of our leading 
plant-growers, in which plants grown in pots all the summer are 
described as superior to those that have been planted out and 
potted in the autumn. In my small stock of fifteen plants I found 
on December 18th last, twelve were showing spathes, and seven had 
fully expanded spathes. These were planted out about the middle 
of May in the kitchen garden. The roots were not disturbed, 
but some old potting soil was packed round them. An occasional 
watering in dry weather was all the attention they received till 
they were again lifted the second week of September. They 
were placed in 6 and 8-inch pots, stood on a plank behind a 
north wall, where they were syringed twice a day in bright 
weather. Early in October they were placed in a late Peach 
house, but free from frost, and where the syringing is continued 
on the mornings of fine days. By the third week of October the 
roots had taken possession of the soil, and a few of the plants 
showing bloom. The plants were then removed to an early vinery, 
the temperature ranging from 40° to 55° according to the weather. 
This is all the forcing that was necessary to produce the result 
above stated.—R. Inglis. 
REVIEW OF BOOK. 
Text Booh of Botany , Morphological and Physiological. By 
Julius Sachs. Edited by Sydney H. Vines, M.A., D.Sc., F.L.S. 
Second edition. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1882. 
The first English edition of Sachs’s “Text Book of Botany” 
has been for some years out of print, and the botanical public 
have been eagerly looking for the second, which now reaches us 
under the able editorship of Dr. Vines. The work is so univer¬ 
sally recognised as the best text book for advanced students in 
botany, and is so widely known, that any criticism or even 
description of its general scope by a reviewer is needless. As 
compared with the first English edition, which bears the date 
1875, it indicates the marked advance which botanical science 
has made in the interval. It has long been admitted that it is in 
investigations of the lowest rather than of the highest forms of 
either vegetable or animal life that the philosophical physiologist 
and evolutionist must seek to gain insight into the mysterious 
laws, still so imperfectly known, which underlie the phenomena 
of organic life, and which connect together the links in the endless 
chain of living beings. The study of cryptogamy has in conse¬ 
quence found of late years many ardent followers both in this 
country and on the continent, and our knowledge of some of the 
lowest forms of vegetable life has been greatly enlarged. The 
increased attention paid to this branch of botany is manifested by 
the large space devoted to it in the volume before us, and by the 
variation in its treatment from that which it received in the 
earlier edition. As regards the primary classification of cryp¬ 
togams, or rather of their lowest section, the Thallophyta, Prof. 
Sachs is an able advocate of the system, now widely followed 
in Germany, of discarding the familiar classification into Fungi 
and Algae, dependant on the absence or presence of chlorophyll. 
Considering this not to be a differentiation which underlies any 
necessary great difference in organic structure, but rather an 
adaptation to external conditions, he divides the Thallophytes— 
i.e., everything below Mosses and Liverworts—into four classes, 
distinguished essentially by their mode of reproduction — the 
Protophyta, Zygospore®, Oospore®, and Carpospore®, in each of 
which are two parallel series, one autonomous and containing 
chlorophyll, the other parasitic and destitute of chlorophyll. In 
accordance with the researches of Schwendener and others, Lichens 
are deposed from their position as a primary class, and described 
as a section of the Ascomycetes, themselves an order of Carpo- 
spore®. All Lichens are, in fact, regarded as illustrations of that 
singular commensalism or symbiosis of which so many examples 
have lately been detected in both the animal and vegetable king¬ 
doms ; in this instance consisting of organisms destitute of chloro¬ 
phyll (Fungi), parasitic on those that contain it (Alg®). 
Although it is more and more fully recognised that scientific 
knowledge must lie at the base of all sound horticulture—that the 
horticulturist must be a botanist before he can be a successful 
horticulturist—yet anyone practically engaged in horticulture will 
naturally turn with special interest to that portion of this bulky 
volume, about one-third of the whole, which is devoted to those 
problems of physiology which puzzle him or which exercise his 
attempts at solution, as he comes across them in his daily avoca¬ 
tions. And he will find abundant focd for thougltful study in 
the chapters with the following headings :—Molecular Forces in 
the Plant; Chemical Processes in the Plant; General Conditions 
of Plant Life ; the Mechanics of Growth ; Periodic Movements of 
the Mature Parts of Plants and Movements dependant on Irrita¬ 
tion ; the Phenomena of Sexual Reproduction ; the Origin of 
Species. 
It might have been wished that Prof. Sachs had adopted 
Darwin’s admirable plan of giving at the close of each section of 
his works a summary of the results obtained. In the absence of 
such summaries we may illustrate his mode of dealing with his 
subject by the following general statement of the phenomena 
connected with periodically motile and irritable parts of plants. 
“ It is remarkable that all organs at present known as coming 
under this category are, in a morphological sense, foliar structures 
—as green foliage, leaves, petals, stamens, or occasionally parts of 
the carpels (styles or stigmas). It is the more striking that no 
axial structures or parts of stems are contractile in this sense, 
because the contractile parts of leaves are usually cylindrical, or 
at least are not expanded flat, and therefore possess the ordinary 
form of an axis. There is this further agreement in the anatomi¬ 
cal structure of all parts which exhibit these phenomena—that a 
very succulent mass of parenchyma envelopes an axial fibro- 
vascular bundle or a few bundles running parallel to one another, 
the elements composing these bundles being only slightly or not 
at all lignified, therefore remaining extensible and flexible—a fact 
of importance in reference to the possibility of the movement, 
which consists of flexions upwards and downwards, generally in 
the median plane of the organ ; the fibrovascular bundle thus 
forming the neutral axis of the curvature. The mass of paren¬ 
chyma which envelopes the fibrovascular bundle often has the 
form of a pulvinus, and does not contain in its outer layers any 
air-conducting intercellular spaces, or only very small ones ; while 
in the inner layers they are larger, especially in the immediate 
vicinity of the bundle, these being, according to Morren, Unger, 
and Pfeifer, wanting only in the irritable stamens of Berberis and 
Mahonia. The tension of these layers of tissue, which is gene¬ 
rally very considerable, is caused by the stronger turgidity of the 
parenchymatous cells on the one hand and the elasticity of the 
axial bundle and epidermis on the other hand. As far as obser¬ 
vations go at present, especially those made on the larger contrac¬ 
tile organs, the tendency to extension is greatest in the middle 
layer of the parenchyma between the epidermis and the axial 
bundle, but the elastic resistance of the epidermis is less than 
that of the bundle.” 
One great value of this work is the copiousness of the references 
to the most recent and trustworthy memoirs on special depart¬ 
ments of the subject. Its main purpose is to describe the pheno¬ 
mena of plant life which are already accurately known, and to 
indicate those theories and problems in which botanical research 
is at present especially engaged. It would obviously defeat this 
object if special points were gone into too much in detail; but 
