REVIEW 
THE FLORA OF SOUTH AFRICA, WITH SYNOPTICAL TABLES 
OF THE GENERA OF THE HIGHER PLANTS. By Rudolph 
Marloth. Yol. i. Large 8vo. pp. xviii, 264, with 36 coloured and 
30 monochrome plates and 109 text-photographs and figures. Cape 
Town : Darter Bros, & Co. London: William Wesley & Son. 1913. 
All who are interested in the wonderful vegetation of South Africa will 
welcome the appearance of the first volume of this work. It is to be followed 
by three others of the same type and a supplementary volume which is to 
contain, among other valuable matter, a map with explanatory notes on the 
phytogeographical regions of South Africa and an index of English and Dutch 
names of South African plants. When it is completed, it will be one of the 
most notable contributions yet made to the advancement of South African 
Botany. Nothing of quite the same kind has hitherto been attempted either 
in South Africa or elsewhere. The sumptuous character of the work, which 
will be highly appreciated by all who realise the remarkable wealth and 
beauty of the material which offers itself for treatment, has been made possible 
by the generosity of Lady Phillips who thus renders a very signal service to 
the study of Botany in South Africa; its execution could only have been 
entrusted to one who possesses a wide knowledge of the living vegetation of 
South Africa and therefore to none so appropriately as to Dr Marloth. 
The volume before us devotes 38 pages to the Thallophyta; 21 to the 
Bryophyta ; 23 to the Pteridophyta ; 22 to the Gymnosperms and 1 26 to the 
lower groups of the Dicotyledons up to and including the Rhoeadales. In a 
work bearing the title The Flora of South A frica and which confessedly gives 
to the term “Flora” a broad and scientific connotation, one might expect 
that when the seed-bearing plants are treated with so lavish a generosity, the 
setting forth of the lower groups would have been somewhat less curtailed. 
But although Dr Marloth has had the assistance of various botanists possessing 
special knowledge of some of the more primitive groups — which is suitably 
acknowledged in the preface and elsewhere — one must remember that com- 
paratively little attention has yet been given in South Africa to groups lowei 
than the seed-plants. And there is no doubt that the few pages devoted to 
