Town and Window Gardening. By Catherine M. Buckton. (Long- mans.)—This
little book cannot fail to prove useful in encouraging a taste for the cultivation of window plants amongst children, and especially amongst the children of the poor. It contains a groat deal more than mere directions as to the choice, cultivation, and arrangement of flowers for window gardens. Mrs. Buckton endeav- ours to explain the structure, functions, relationships, and uses of a large number of common plants, and so to provoke an intelligent interest in the objects of the care of her young auditors,—for the book is a reprint of a course of sixteen lectures to children. With the practical part of the volume no fault can be found, while the illustrations, 127 in number, are, for the most part, appropriate and accurate ; but there are a good many slips in the statements and explanations which involve a knowledge of vegetable physiology and chemistry. Mrs. Buckton would do well to revise her pages carefully, before issuing a second edition ; it is too useful a book to be marred by the gratuitous introduction of old-fashioned and pseudo-scientific statements. The omission of scientific explanations is to be preferred to the introduction of errors. We are not object- ing to the popular forms in which scientific statements are made,. but to downright mistakes. We cite a few instances where correc- tions are urgently needed. Wheat is not laid because of absence or silica (p. 32), nor do the flowers of immortelles remain nuwithered for- years because they contain a great deal of flint (p. 98). Plants do. not produce ozone (p. 26), nor has it been ascertained that they liberate free hydrogen (p. 30) from ammonia. It will be new to. botanists to learn (p. 32) that the walls of cells become coated with the minerals taken up by a plant, just as a kettle does with lime. Aconite is one of the names of the plant monkshood, not of the poison it contains (p. 102). It sounds odd to hear of a pineapple being " covered with flattened spaces" (p. 199) ; the specific name " in- festans " applied to the potato-fungus is misprinted on page 129. Scores of inaccuracies like those above cited might be corrected, not only without sacrificing the simplicity and the intelligibility of these interesting lessons on window-gardening, but with consider- able advantage to every useful feature which they now present.
Previous page
