The Student's Guide to Systematic Botany

Abstract

THIS little book, which aims chiefly at supplying the wants of medical and pharmaceutical students, represents fairly what was the state of systematic botany in England twenty years ago. The bulk of the book is occupied with a detailed description of the natural orders of Phanerogams, while the Cryptogams are dismissed in fourteen pages. But it is not only by the very cursory way in which these plants are treated that the student is led to underrate the importance of the morphological differences by which the various groups of Cryptogams are distinguished; the heterogeneous series of Algæ and Fungi are described as “orders” comparable, as regards the terms used in the classification, with the orders of the Angiosperms. Again, in the text, signs of antiquity are numerous: for instance, in distinguishing the Cryptogamia from the Phanerogamia (p. 14) we find that the former “are reproduced by spores, and are therefore acotyle-donous,” a sentence which implies that the spore is the homologue of the seed! In describing the ferns no mention is made of the prothallus, antheridia, or archegonia, though the latter are described as occurring in the mosses, and resulting in the formation of a “sporangium.” These examples are sufficient to show that this book does not meet the present requirements even of medical students, who now have access to other text-books, treating of the principles of systematic botany in a manner more in accordance with the present state of the science than the “Student's Guide” of Prof. Bentley.