in specimens growing at Kew." Were they not imperfectly developed blossoms, perhaps late in the season? Here the flowers open freely, and have rose-colored petals. If he will examine fresh specimens of Scrophularia, it will soon be clear that his idea of their self-fertilization (p. 371) is a mistake. It is a mere slip in the "Genera Plantarum" through which abortive stamens are attributed to the cleistogamous flowers of Epiphegus. The authors evidently meant to describe the case just as Mr. Henslow found it to be, but used a wrong word. "Weeds are probably all self-fertilizing or anemophilous. A weed is simply an unattractive plant, and possessing no feature worthy of cultivation." It may be as difficult to define "a weed" as to define "dirt." But, turning to the "Handbook of the British Flora," we find, as we expected, that the showy Corn Poppy, Cockle, and Larkspur are denominated weeds. Why weeds should possess the vigor and gain the predominance which they do is a large question, to which other solutions have been offered than that one which is in this essay very plausibly maintained. We cannot take up the topic here; but, without acceding to his general proposition, we are much disposed to agree with the author in this essay, as respects some of them, that aptitude for self-fertilization may have given them the advantage which has determined their wide dispersion. The insistence upon the importance of self-fertilization is what gives this essay its value. As a whole it fortifies the proposition, well laid down by Herman Müller, which Mr. Henslow cites: "that, under certain conditions, the facility for self-fertilization is most advantageous to a plant, while, under other conditions, the inevitableness of cross-fertilization by the visits of insects is the more advantageous." But this is not our author's thesis. It comes to this: the plan of nature is either cross-fertilization supplemented by close-fertilization, or close-fertilization tempered by cross-fertilization. As restricted to plants the difference is not wide. Regarded generally, the Darwinian axiom is still best sustained. PLANT ARCHEOLOGY. 1 INVESTIGATIONS in fossil botany are recondite and technical, the materials generally unattractive, and the results unintelligible to the popular mind; but in Count Saporta's "Monde des Plantes," and under his happy exposition, the stony desert is made to rejoice and blossom as the Rose. The interest which we take in the vegetation of former periods is not so much geological as genealogical; and this interest diminishes with the distance from our own time and environment. We know nothing of the earliest plants — the beginnings of vegetable even more than of animal life are beyond our ken; no great satisfaction seems obtainable from the small acquaintance that has been made with the plants which flourished before the carboniferous period. And the botany of that age, notwithstanding its wealth of Ferns and its adumbrations of next higher types, impresses us as much with the sense of strangeness as of wonderful luxuriance. For even the fern-impressions, familiar as they may look to the unprofessional observer, are outlandish. The more the critical student knows of them the less likeness he finds in them, or in the coal-vegetation generally, to any species or genera now living. But in the vegetation of cretaceous, and still more of tertiary times, familiar forms first come to view, and pedigrees may begin to be traced. Questions of ancestry touch. us more nearly than those of history; so an enquiry into the source and parentage of the plants with which man is associated is more attractive than any question concerning the origin of the pristine vegetation of the earth. Moreover, our 1 Le Monde des Plantes avant l'Apparition de l'Homme. Par le Comte de Saporta. Paris and New York, 1879. (The Nation, Nos. 742 and 743, September 18 and 25, 1879.) 2 To those who wish to get a good coup d'œil of this vegetation from authentic records systematically arranged, we recommend the " Atlas to the Coal Flora of Pennsylvania and of the Carboniferous Formation throughout the United States," by Leo Lesquereux, an octavo volume of eighty-seven double plates, just issued by the Second Geological Survey of Pennsylvania. There is nothing else to be compared with it. knowledge of the later fossil botany is comparatively full, wonderfully so, considering how very recent this knowledge is, —and we are in a condition to apply it hopefully and confidently to the solution of problems which not long ago seemed to be beyond the reach of proper scientific enquiry, namely, to the explanation of the actual distribution of the species of plants over the earth. For the main data themselves, and for the clear exposition of them, we are most largely indebted to three men, who happily are still alive and active - Heer, Lesquereux, and Saporta. The Linnæus and facile princeps of tertiary botany is Oswald Heer, of Zürich, now a septuagenarian, but still in harness. His "Recherches sur la Climat et la Vegetation du Pays Tertiare," rendered into French by C. T. Gaudin, was published nearly twenty years ago. It is a general and comparatively untechnical presentation of a long line of investigations, which have since been crowned by his several memoirs on arctic phyto-paleontology, now collected in the five volumes of his "Flora Fossilis Arctica." All these volumes, as well as others on the Swiss tertiary, have appeared within the last ten years, the latest only a year ago. Leo Lesquereux, Heer's compatriot, and barely his junior, came to the United States fully thirty years ago, drawn hither from Neufchâtel by Agassiz. The greater part of his researches relate to the carboniferous flora, and he has recently thrown interesting light upon silurian botany, as has Dawson of Montreal upon the intermediate devonian. But those which at present concern us relate to the cretaceous and the tertiary of our own western regions. The most considerable of these works are the two notable quarto volumes, entitled "Contributions to the Fossil Flora of the Western Territories," published by the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories under Dr. Hayden, upon whom and whose survey they reflect high credit. One volume treats of the cretaceous, one of the tertiary flora. Any proper enumeration of authorities upon the fossil botany of the later periods should include various other names, and especially that of Schimper, of Strassburg, who, like Lesquereux, has divided his life between bryology and fossil botany, and whose classical "Traité de Paléontologie Végétale" is a systematic compendium of what was known of fossil plants up to the year 1874. But the volume now under notice is by a younger man, Gaston, Comte de Saporta, a Provençal, who has for fifteen years or more been investigating the rich tertiary deposits of Aix and vicinity, in the delta of the Rhone, the results of which have appeared from time to time in memoirs, mainly published in the "Annales des Sciences Naturelles." Besides these weightier and more technical publications, Count Saporta has contributed to the "Revue des Deux Mondes" and to "La Nature" subsidiary articles of a popular cast and of fine literary as well as scientific finish. These, now collected and re-edited, form a part of the volume before us, "Le Monde des Plantes avant l'Apparition de l'Homme," which has been published since the commencement of the current year. It is the most comprehensive and the most attractive, as well as the most recent, exposition of our subject, is a very readable book from beginning to end, of inviting typography, with abundant illustrations, both of woodcuts in the letter-press and intercalated plates. Although a popular, it is a truly scientific volume. The clear stream of the narrative is hardly at all troubled by the many technical terms which unavoidably strew its course, yet without obstructing its flow, for the author has the peculiarly French gift of happy exposition. As the volume is likely to be reproduced in English, let us hope that it may have a translator in whose hands it may lose nothing of its clearness, and as little as possible of its freshness and spirit. To attempt a popular abstract of such a book would be like skimming the cream from the cream, and a critical review would cover too much or too technical ground. Still, we may give some general idea of the contents of the volume. The first part and the most discursive portion of the book is entitled "Phenomena and Theories." The introductory chapter discourses upon the introduction of life and the origin of the earliest terrestrial organisms; and the second chapter takes up the theory of Evolution or Transformism. We may skip these chapters, yet without advising the reader to follow the example, unless he is already familiar with the topic-now a little threadbare for, as a popular presentation, it is neat and sensible, though not profound. It hardly need be said that Saporta is an evolutionist, using the term in its general sense, and apparently a thorough Darwinian. A vegetable palæontologist who studies the later geological deposits cannot be otherwise; at least, he must needs be a "transformist." Saporta concludes that palæontology, if it does not furnish demonstration, yet gives irresistible reasons for a belief in evolution. The ground and the nature of this conviction appear in his rounded statement, that there is not a tree or shrub in Europe, in North America, at the Canaries, in the Mediterranean region, the ancestry of which is not recogniz able, more or less distinctly, in a fossil state. This is too absolutely stated, no doubt, but the qualifications it may need will not invalidate the conclusion. The chapter on ancient climates which follows, and forms a proper introduction to the second part of the book, is worthy of particular attention. It is prefaced by an elementary but very graphic exposition of the phenomena and laws of climates and their diversities, from the regular succession of equal days and nights under the equator to the contrasted condition toward the pole of a year composed of a day and a night season, separated by a season of twilight; the change so rapid in the high latitudes that, while the summer day at the North Cape is two months long, at Spitzbergen seven additional degrees of latitude lengthen it to four months. Let the author point the contrast between the two extremes, as affecting man, in his own language, here somewhat exceptionally "Il est vrai que dans ce dernier pays [Spitzbergen] le soleil s'élève au plus de 37 degrés au-dessus de l'horizon; il n'envoie que des rayons sans chaleur, telum imbelle sine ictu; il éclaire de sa lueur pâle une terre glacée où frissonnent quelques plantes ensevelies sous les frimas, et qui ne sortent du sommeil qui les tient dix mois inertes que pour accomplir hâtivement leurs fonctions vitales et se rendormir de nouveau. Quel tableau, si l'on songe aux forêts |