Abstract
This beautiful book is a great disappointment. The title, the nice paper, with its broad margin and excellent print, and, above all, the majority of the one hundred and thirty full-page plates paraded, and by no means unjustly so, on the title-page, all promise so much, and yet—on looking beneath the surface we find no depth. Typical examples of the disappointments in store for the reader are furnished by Plates 14 and i; it would be difficult to over-praise the beauty of the process-work of the former plate, and yet practically all the information the author gives is confined to a few meagre lines on pp. 58 and 6o, chiefly concerned with a note as to where the specimen was found. True, more search shows that Plate 47 is concerned with the same subject, and somewhat more scientific hints are appended to this on p. 126; but why, in the name of all knowledge, are we not told something of the structure I I and development of these galls and their contents? Unless we are mistaken, or misled by synonymy, the very example here referred to is a classical one. Did not Dujardin describe the mite in the hazel-buds in 1851? and did not Miss Ormerod and Schlechtendal show that witches' brooms on the alder arise from the irritation set up by similar species? In this connection, also, excellent illustrations of the witches' brooms them-selves are given on Plates 1, 16, 17 and 18, with such irritating gossip as “this very interesting tree stands just within the confines of the Park” —“Park,” with a capital P!
British Vegetable Galls, an Introduction to their Study
By E. T. Connold. Pp. xi + 312 (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1901.) Price 10s. 6d. net.
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Galls . Nature 65, viii (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/0651695viiia0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/0651695viiia0