Abstract
IT is not often that anything has been done to popularise the study of the plants of the past, a subject of which the “educated layman” is, as a rule, profoundly ignorant. This neat little volume, with its, beautiful photographic illustrations of some of the most important coal-plants (club-mosses, ferns and fern-like seed-plants, horsetails, sphenophylls, and early gytnnosperms) is well calculated to rouse an interest in the flora of so many million years ago. The great majority of the photographs are from casts and impressions, showing the external aspect of the fossils, and these are all admirable; we have never seen a better collection. Some of the few microphotographs of sections, illustrating the internal structure, are equally good, though in one or two cases clearer examples might have been selected. The short explanatory notes (scarcely a dozen pages in all) are, as the name of the author guarantees, thoroughly sound and up to date; they are just enough to whet the reader's appetite for more, which is all that can be expected or desired of a sixpenny nature picture-book.
Fossil Plants.
Sixty Photographs illustrating the Flora of the Coal-measures. By E. A. Newell Arber. Pp. 75. Gowans's Nature Books, No. 21. (London: Gowans and Gray, Ltd, 1909.) Price 6d. net.
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Fossil Plants . Nature 81, 304 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/081304c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/081304c0