Reviews 
136 
There is much fresh, straightforward, interesting treatment of many im¬ 
portant topics in Prof. Small’s work, but of its general plan and contents as an 
introduction to the subject we cannot approve. At the best it may be useful 
as a work of reference for the elementary student, but for this purpose it is 
hardly full enough or critical enough. We regard it as a pity that the author 
did not devote his remarkable gifts to the writing of a real introduction to 
botany. He has knowledge, humour, enthusiasm, courage and the power of 
concise yet interesting exposition, though his style, as has been said by another 
critic, is sometimes rather breathless. With more forethought and judgment 
he might, we believe, have produced the best introduction to botany that has 
yet been written. 
The publication of these three books within a few months of one another, 
by heads of teaching departments, certainly does encourage the hope that the 
teaching of elementary botany is beginning to get into more fruitful paths. 
A. G. T. 
AN EXAMPLE TO BE AVOIDED. 
Baines, A. E. Germination in its Electrical Aspect . Routledge, 1921. 
Mr Bainps puts down a defensive barrage in beginning the preface to his 
book with the following sentence: 
“When this book, a plainly written account of laborious research passes 
into the hands of reviewers I would ask those gentlemen to remember that a 
great humanitarian question is involved and that while my personal opinion 
upon matters of detail may seem worthy of attack the fundamental truth I 
have put forward...is of too great importance to mankind to be passed over, 
or to be, to all intents and purposes, shelved by saying there is very little that 
is new in it.” Barrages however can and must be passed through. The ‘ funda¬ 
mental truth’ which the book deals with is that the germination and growth 
of a plant are both governed by electrical stimuli. For example, the embryo 
of the dry horse chestnut seed when it falls from the tree is said to have an 
electrostatic charge insulated from the soil by the dry testa. When moistening 
occurs this charge is liberated, a current is set up and this gives the necessary 
stimulus to cause growth. No attempt is made by the author to examine his 
numerous experiments in the light of our present knowledge. In some cases 
the results from which he deduces evidence confirmatory of his ‘truth’ are 
explicable by well authenticated phenomena requiring no assumption of the 
presence of electrical currents, e.g. punctured acorns refused to germinate, 
this might be because their electrostatic charge was liberated or it might be 
because they had been allowed to become too dry before the experiment. In 
other cases the numbers of plants grown were so small that the observations 
are valueless, e.g. in one case three tufts of grass were planted out in pots and 
each pot was treated in a different manner. Had three thousand or even three 
hundred plants been taken the results might have inspired some confidence. 
The whole book is interlarded with the author’s opinions stated without any 
experimental support; it also contains very numerous lengthy quotations 
from the works of well-known Botanists, many of which are distorted or com¬ 
mented on in an extraordinary fashion. In short, although this reviewer is 
perfectly prepared to believe in the “fundamental truth” when some sound 
experimental data are brought forward in its support, he has failed to find 
them in this book. s. h. w. 
