10 SEPTEMBER 1864, Page 22

up a very handsome volume, and is copiously illustrated with

coloured prints of the various ferns, mosses, seaweeds, lichens, and fungi, which will be :vety useful to collectors, from the care with which they imitate nature, and the consequent aid they give in the recognition of

what are to them new specimens. A scientific arrangement, however,

having been selected by the author, her name is a little misleading. This is not a narrative of a botanist's excursions, but a systematic work with little bits of description interspersed. One chapter we are in Cornwall, the next in Yorkshire, and the next perhaps in Derbyshire, and the personal incidents seem in consequence to be unconnected and

out of place. In short the author seems to ns to have fallen between two stools—to have written neither a systematic treatise nor an agreeable narrative—while it was quite in her power to have given us either, but not both at once.