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t^ La Bl'oLOGIE V^GETALE.
lucidity from a strict avoidance of those hard terras in which
physiologists—especially German ones— wallow. It goes farther in
making no very exhaustive demands on knowledge of other sciences
to enable the reader to keep pace with the author. It shows us, in
fact, that the life of plants, so far as it is understood, is essentially
a simple affair ; that what we know of it may be told, in outline at
all events, in plain language, and with no recondite references. One
can conceive that this is calculated to bring the study into contempt
in some quarters, but no doubt that will be survived. That which
is abstruse in the study, and difficult in the extreme, calling for the
highest efforts of the human mind, is the prosecution of the inquiry
and the winning of accurate results. The two things have been too
long confounded. M. Vuillemin has happily recognised this, and
he does not forget it. His book is a French one in more than one
sense. There is a prominence in it of French methods of treatment,
and probably this is as it should be—at the worst it is not so
exclusively national in its treatment as many German books of
the kind.
The introductory chapter is perhaps not equal to the remainder
of the book in point of simplicity. The first chapter deals with
the cell, and the second continues the subject. Chapter III. deals
with the bodies of plants, the formation of tissues, and the combinations
of these as exhibited in cellular and vascular plants. Chapter
IV. is devoted to functions, and is introductory to what follows.
The fifth chapter treats of fixation, support, and protection. Chapter
VI. (misprinted IV.) is a long one, and it deals with absorption in
perhaps somewhat too great detail, considering the balance of the
book. The subject is tedious, and the author occasionally succumbs
to it. Moreover, he takes absorption in a very comprehensive
sense, and perhaps it would have been better to break up this
chapter, and give its contents under several headings. Strangely
enough, some of the most interesting and forcible passages in the
book are embedded in this chapter. Excretion is used in a similarly
comprehensive sense as the title of the next chapter—the giving off
of gases and liquids, &c., being here dealt with alongside of much
else. The eighth chapter is devoted to respiration, and the ninth
has the inclusive title " transformations internes," and it keeps its
promise ! Chapter X. deals with the specially vital functions,
while the last two (XI. and XII.) treat of the social life of plants,
the former of the relations— social and sexual—between individuals
of the same species, and the latter of the relations between different
species, finishing with very interesting sections on parasitism and
symbiosis.
There only remains the duty of mentioning that the book is
well-printed and of handy form. The woodcuts are bad, so bad that
they often fail to illustrate the author's meaning, and there is no
index. The tdble des maticres is a mere list of chapter headings.
However, one would not thus ungraciously part with so excellent a
book. The author has earned for it a high degree of success by his
efforts to write attractively and accurately on a subject which often
wears a forbidding aspect. G. M.