A Popular Illustrated Botany for the Home and School. By Mara L. Pratt. 4to. Pp. 154. Illustrated. Boston: Educational Publishing Company. "Teach your boys, also, the little legends and poetry of the flowers - make the flowers real, living things to them - teach them that the grandest men, many of the most noted writers, have always loved the flowers, and have thought it worth while to be very tender in their dealings with them. Break up in your boys any existing notion that flowers are good enough for girls'; or that it is manly to trample down the little purple violets, or to snap off the heads of the bright-faced daisies. The average healthy, wide-awake boy may rebel at 'set' moralizing, but he is not insensible to the beauty and grandeur of nature if only we are wise enough to present it to him in a way that he can accept and understand." This avowal of the purpose of the book is healthful, sympathetic and practical. We need to get more sentiment into the minds of children rather than more out of them. The old style of didactic or "set" moralizing is unnatural and repulsive, and much of the present distrust of sentiment is due to it. When flowers become "real living things" to the young, an indelible taste for nature is assured.

This "fairy land of flowers " seems to us to present a good guide to the early observation and love of nature. It requires the actual- experience of the teacher with it to test its strength, but it certainly undertakes the subject in the right spirit. A few simple lessons introduce the book upon how plants grow and flower, and an easy key and flora follow. Short poems and some stories are interspersed. Such a book - much like our Chatterbox books - must be very attractive to a child.

The illustrations are not always good. Many of them are simply ornaments to the page, as they show no characteristics of the plants, while some are positively misleading. A picture of an hepatica represents branching and many flowered scapes! One of the labiate nettles is inserted to represent the true nettle, and the picture of cockle represents anything but that plant. . On Seedless Fruits. Memoirs of the Torrey Botanical Club, Vol. I, No. 4. By E. Lewis Sturtevant. Pp. 44. 75 cents. This is the second time that Dr. Sturtevant has prepared an essay upon this subject, and it therefore presents the results of a prolonged investigation. The author is the possessor of a library very rich in economic botany, and he is a wide reader; and he has gleaned diligently for the facts in this paper. The paper is an alphabetical catalogue of fruits which are wholly or partially seedless, the term fruit being used in the horticultural sense. 61 entries are made. Among the fruits of common culture in this country, the apple, barberry, cherry, cucumber, currant, grape, kaki, melon, mulberry, orange, pear, pineapple, plum, raspberry, strawberry and tomato are discussed. The seedless plum is undoubtedly the monstrous fruit produced by the fungus Taphrina pruni.

A most interesting chapter could have been written upon seedless cucumbers, a subject that has never yet been fully analyzed.

Child's Botany.

Seedless Fruits.

The author has not purposed to give any elaborate discussion of the known or assumed causes of seedlessness, but he has indicated some of the most common and probable ones. He thinks that tenderness of flesh is usually associated with slight seed-producing power, and it seems to be a "legitimate field for horticultural effort, to experiment with seed from nearly seedless forms, or with seed which is more fragile or seemingly imperfect, in the endeavor to produce increased quality, as also with seed from unripe fruit." The paper is a suggestive and valuable one throughout, and should be in the hands of all who study plants.