70 
BOTANICAL LITERATURE. 
British Plants, 2 vols. 8vo., which can now be purchased at less than half its 
original price in town. There is a work publishing in fasciculi, entitled 
Genera Plantarum Florae Germanicce, by Nees ab Esenbeck, which, as it con¬ 
tains plates with minute dissections of the flowers and fructification of every 
genus indigenous to such an extensive tract of country as Germany, at a mode¬ 
rate price, deserves to be in the hands of every British botanist, and to a student 
is most valuable. It has, besides, this great advantage, that though arranged 
on the natural system, only the characters of the genera, with descriptions of the 
plates, are given, in Latin, and no Linncean will be displeased by any derogatory 
remarks, or untoward disputes, for as every genus is referred to its place in the 
Linneean system, the work is of course equally useful to every botanist. It may 
be obtained at Bailliere’s in Regent-street, which it is perhaps neeessary to 
mention, lest there should be “ none in town.” 
I shall now suppose that our inquiring botanist, having mastered his elements, 
has determined to investigate the indigenous plants of his native country. If he 
commence with the Phanerogamia , or flowering plants, the following works are 
indispensable:—Sir J. E. Smith’s English Flora , 4 vols. 8vo., Hooker’s British 
Flora, 8 vo., Lindley’s Synopsis of the British Flora . But all these are without 
plates, and in doubtful cases a good representation of a plant is something more 
than a luxury. Curtis’s Flora Londinensis, folio, or Sowerby’s English Bo¬ 
tany, 36 vols. 8vo., should be obtained if the student has £50 or £60 to lay out 
in books, or if not, at any rate a new edition of Sowerby is now publishing in 
numbers at one shilling. There is also a cheap work by Baxter of Oxford, on 
British Flowering Plants, very good as far as it goes, and enriched with interest¬ 
ing notes. But the plates, it is to be regretted, are very coarsely engraved. There 
is also a Supplement to the English Botany, in 2 vols. 8vo. Numerous local 
Floras, as they are denominated, have been published, but they are now mostly 
obsolete, and in fact as their results appear in Watsons New Botanists Guide to 
the localities of the rarer Plants of Britain, which should be obtained to see what 
field has been left unoccupied, they may be dispensed with unless picked up acci¬ 
dentally at a book-stall. 
The above, however, will not suffice if the Cryptogamic tribes are intended to 
be studied. In this case the second volume of Hooker’s British Flora is requi¬ 
site, and Withering’s Arrangement of British Plants, 4 vols., contains the 
most popular account of the Fungi. Gray’s Natural Arrangement, also before 
adverted to, contains the Acotyledones. On the Ferns, and their allies, an ad¬ 
mirable little work with plates on a reduced scale of all the British species has 
recently been published by Mr. Francis, of London, at a very moderate price 
(See Vol. II., p. 226.). On the Jungermannice, the work of Sir W. J. Hooker, 
in 4to., is the great authority, or there is a cheaper enumeration of the German 
species, by Ekart, with uncoloured plates, entitled Synopsis Jungermanniarum . 
