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STECHERT-HAFNER
VOLUME XX, NUMBER 3, NOVEMBER 1965
Book News
Reference Tools for the Botanist
By JOSEPH EWAN
THE botanist's bookshelf has two sections based on use: primary tools or the elbow-books and secondary, usually multi-volumed, reference books. Which books he will choose varies as the botanists themselves. This inventory includes selections of colleagues active in the plant sciences though inevitably it must stand a personal selection. Moreover, there is no intention of repeating the "Bibliographies of Botany" of J. Christian Bay, published in volume three, pp. 331-456, of J. P. Loty's Progressus Rei Botanicae (1910), though that topically arranged bibliography will still prove rewarding today.
Elbow-books
Whatever flower bed the botanist may cultivate, Pritzel's "Thesaurus of Botanical Literature" (1872-[1877]) remains the single most useful answerbook for tracing a botanical title before 1870. Fortunately Pritzel is available in a good Milan reprint (1949). The chronologic topical indices provide a reference list of short titles not easily picked up elsewhere. Too often current research fails to verify the roots of its flowering, voluminous in many instances, and Pritzel lays bare those roots. "Pritzel, as well as being no mean botanist, was a professional librarian, and his work was founded upon personal scrutiny—the 'autopsy' of the earlier practitioners—and upon a careful comparison of copies and editions, all this information being summarized and set out with great skill." Thus wrote the librarian of the British Museum (Natural History), the late A. C. Townsend, himself a rara avis in the aviary of bibliographers. Supplementary to Pritzel is Daydon Jackson's Guide to the Literature of Botany (London, 1881), recently reprinted, adding nearly 6000 titles and rather copiously annotated with lines of comment. Another tool Daydon Jackson sharpened for the student is Glossary of Botanic Terms (1928, being the 4th and latest ed.). This is the standard dictionary notwithstanding a noticeable British accent.
For queries like "What flora has been published for Ecuador?" "Is there a checklist of the plants of the Azores?" there is the Geographical Guide to the Floras of the World, part I (142), by Blake and Atwood. The late Dr. Sidney Fay Blake, a rare scholar, was assisted by Dr. Bernice G. Schubert in completing the Guide with part II (1961). E. D. Merrill, energizer of so many worthwhile botanical enterprises in this country and abroad, joined Egbert H. Walker to produce a Bibliography of Eastern Asiatic Botany (1938). A handy feature of Merrill-Walker is the conspectus of world serials of botany. Though partly labelled for eastern Asia, the subject indices will lead to answers for subtropical plant questions around the world. Dr. Walker published a Supplement in 1960. Another bibliography of wider use than the title would suggest is Ida K. Langman's Selected Guide to the Literature on the Flowering Plants of Mexico (1964) with its 156-page index to subjects, fully cross-indexed.
The best all-round introduction to plant classification yet written is G. H. M. Lawrence, Taxonomy of Vascular Plants (1951), with its literature references appended to each chapter. Students keep their copies after the course is over. What better recommendation? But the real Kohinoor of your cabinet is Richard Wettstein's Handbuch der systematischen Botanik (ed. 4, 1935), reprinted in 1962 after the original issue became unobtainable. There is no English translation but there is a Spanish Edition (Madrid, 1944), with inferior reused half-tone illustrations. It is the greatest single twentieth century compendium of systematic botany, containing concise beautifully illustrated accounts of all plant groups, and footnotes to monographs and critical papers concerning each. Milton said a good book is the life-blood of a master spirit: Wettstein documents Milton. More recently Alfred Gundersen drew the plants as they came into flower at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and assembled these drawings and much original commentary on them into his Families of Dicotyledons (1950). Finally there is Arthur M. Johnson's Taxonomy of the Flowering Plants (1931) with its unsurpassed line drawings. Planted in the parterre of old Englerian concepts, Johnson's compendium features subtropical plant families (and thereby favors the frostfree taxonomy classes) but unfortunately the text is marred by too frequent errors arising from hurried reading of the proofs over a Christmas holiday.
There is always the need of plant identifications. The physiologist or geneticist no less than the morphologist or taxonomist will find Bailey's Manual of Cultivated Plants, ed. 2 (1949) the most useful, with its terse descriptions, line drawings, and excellent keys. Not to be superseded soon is Bailey's Cyclopedia of horticulture (ed. 2, 1917, or later printings) in three folio volumes generously illustrated. Incidentally, Karl M. Wiegand's 78-page "Synopsis of the Plant Kingdom" in volume one succinctly summarizes plant families. Picture books give a mischievous sense of success in questions of identification. Confessedly
