Text-Book of Botany, Morphological and Physiological.

Abstract

THERE are not wanting signs that the study of botany is steadily increasing in this country. An immense number of text-books or manuals have been published in English during the last thirty years on the subject, some of which have been very popular, to judge by the many editions they have passed through. Referring to these introductions to the study of botany in general terms, it was to be noted that they all, in a more or less complete manner treated of the vegetable kingdom from a morphological and classificatory point of view; but that the morphological portions were deficient in clear descriptions or conceptions of the origin or development of the members of the plant's body which they described, and the student who required instruction as to physiological, anatomical, or embryological details, had to look for such in the pages of the botanical periodical literature of the day. Most modern workers in biology will agree that the greater portion of this literature was derived from German sources, and it is scarcely to be denied that the first general compendium of note appeared in the German text-book of Sachs. This work had reached a fourth edition in 1874, but the previous editions had found their way into several of the centres of botanical teaching in Great Britain and Ireland, and had caused a considerable change in the older methods of teaching botany. Still it must have been a matter requiring some courage for the delegates of the Clarendon Press to undertake the costly work of translating, editing, and printing in English this work of Sachs', forming a large octavo volume of nearly 1000 pages, a text-book one would think far too large and expensive for most ordinary students. This work was, however, issued from the Clarendon Press in the spring of 1875, and it is not without interest to note that for the last two or three years it has been completely out of print, so that the edition must have been exhausted in the course of the first four or five years after its issue. It was most unfortunate that this edition, so ably translated by Messrs. Bennett and Thiselton Dyer, had not been based on the fourth German edition, which had been published nearly a year before the English translation made its appearance. The success of the translation may, however, be looked on as to a certain extent condoning this misfortune, and there can be doubt as to the revolution in the study of botany in these kingdoms, which has been brought about by its appearance. Instead of to an endless catalogue of under- and above-ground forms of stems, instead of a list as long as that of the ships in Homer of the forms of simple and compound leaves, the student has had his attention—at least in some schools—called to the important structures to be met with in these varied portions of a plant and to their peculiar functions and ontogeny. The subject of plant life and development seems to have become of more especial interest and to have fallen like a new story on many even old ears. It was not, under these circumstances, surprising that a new edition was called for, but it did excite some surprise that, having in a great measure made the demand, the Delegates of the Clarendon Press seemed unable for a time to supply it, and let several Long Vacations glide by without its appearance; even this new edition comes to us late in the autumn season of the year, when the year's fruits have been well garnered in. Still it is welcome as an important contribution to the study of a science that has of old and for long been fostered by the University of Oxford.

Text-Book of Botany, Morphological and Physiological.

By Julius Sachs, Professor of Botany in the University of Würzburg. Edited, with an Appendix, by Sidney H. Vines, M.A., D.Sc., F.L.S., Fellow and Lecturer of Christ's College, Cambridge. Second Edition. (Oxford, 1882.)