ive editions of Dr. Gray's "Structural and
Systematic Botany" are witnesses against the truth of this assumption.
No man can deny that Dr. Gray's books are all of the highest order of
merit. The accuracy and extent of his scholarship are manifest on
every page,--a scholarship consisting not merely in an extensive
acquaintance with the works of other botanists, but in a careful
confirmation of their results, and in additions to their knowledge, by
an observation of Nature for himself. His clearness of style is an
equally valuable characteristic, making the reader sure that he
understands Dr. Gray, and that Dr. Gray understands the subject. In
the "Manual" this clearness of style extends to the judicious
selection of distinctive marks, whereby allied species may be
distinguished from each other. Even the most difficult genera of
golden-rods, asters, and grasses become intelligible in this manual;
and many a less difficult genus which puzzled our boyhood, with
Beck's, Eaton's, and Pursh's manuals, became so plain in Gray, that we
cannot now imagine where was the difficulty. The extent of the field
which Gray's Manual covers prevents him, of course, from giving
such lifelike descriptions of plants as may be found in Dr.
Bigelow's "Plants of Boston and its Vicinity," or such minute
word-daguerreotypes as those in Mr. Emerson's "Trees of
Massachusetts,"--books which no New England student of botany can
afford to be without; but, on the other hand, the description of each
species, aided by typographical devices of Italics, etc., is
sufficient for any intelligent observer to identify a specimen. The
exquisite engravings, illustrating the genera of Ferns, Hepaticae, and
Mosses, are also a great assistance.

The volume which we have marked III. is the fifth revised edition of
the "Botanical Text-Book." It contains a complete, although concise,
sketch of Structural Botany and Vegetable Physiology, and a birds'-eye
view of the whole vegetable kingdom in its subdivision into families,
illustrated by over thirteen hundred engravings on wood. It has become
a standard of botany, wherever our language is read.

For those who do not wish to pursue the study so far, the "First
Lessons" is one of the most happily arranged and happily written
scientific text-books ever published, and is illustrated by three
hundred and sixty well-executed wood-cuts. This takes scholars of
thirteen or fourteen years of age far enough into the recesses of t