Abstract
THIS book, which is founded in part on lectures delivered at the University of Vienna, aims at providing a comprehensive treatise on plants as rock-builders. It is intended both for geologists and botanists, but the whole mode of treatment is botanical rather than geological. The account of the Bacteria and Algte, with which the book opens, will be useful to many students, though the amount of botanical detail in-eluded seems scarcely relevant to the main purpose of the book. Indeed, before the Cormophyta are reached, the reader can scarcely fail to become aware of a certain lack of proportion in the scheme of the work; nearly half the volume is devoted to the Bacteria and Algae, while about the same amount of space is deemed sufficient for the higher plants from Bryophyta to Angiosperms. Even within the latter section of the book, the space assigned to different topics seems to have been allotted with little regard to their relative importance. Less than a dozen pages, for example, are assigned to the Coal-measure flora, whereas more than forty are devoted to marsh and moorland plants of the present day, which are included on the strength of their function as peat-formers.
Pflanzen als Gesteinsbildner.
Von Julius Pia. Pp. viii + 355. (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1926.) 19.50 gold marks.
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Pflanzen als Gesteinsbildner . Nature 118, 585 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118585b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118585b0