The Vegetable IVorld : a History of Plants, with their
Botanical Descrip- tions and Peculiar Properties. By Louis Figuier. Illustrated with 446 en- gravings, interspersed through the text, and 24 full-page illustrations,. by M. Faquet. (Chapman and Hall.)—Another volume of drawing-room science by M. Figuier, companion to The World before the Deluge ; or, as the English translator puts it, a second contribution which M. Figuier has made towards his Tableau de in Nature. The subject-matter does not lend itself to that gentleman's loose and unsystematic style with the same facility as the conjectural history of the antediluvian world ; and. the mixture of vague statement and ill arranged science is not very at- tractive. Moreover, there is the same infelicity in classical allusion. that distinguished the former volume. Aristotle is described as living four hundred years, instead of in the fourth century, before our era;. we hoar of a " Sabean " farm of Horace, and in the derivations from the- Greek of the names of Dr. Lindloy's divisions at p. 221 we have an ex- traordinary confusion. But these volumes are intended to gratify the eye, and they succeed very well in that. There are not in the work. before us any of the startling effects which really give an artistic value to The World before the Deluge, but the illustrations all show care and. finish. The smaller engravings delineating the plants and trees and their different parts are, we are told, and see no reason to doubt, nearly all drawn from nature ; and the representations of vegetable growth in the full-page plates, as in the case of the Pagoda Fig of India (pl. 1),. the Victoria Regis, on a river of Guiana (pl. 5), and the Brazilian forest (pL 23) are exceedingly effective, both from the vigour of the design and the beauty of the execution. We cannot say that wo think this work. of M. Figuier's attractive to read as a whole, but as a book to lie on the table for reference (hero the copious index will be of great use), and to be taken up from time to time for the sake of the pictures, it has a. value which it would be unfair to underrate.
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