Page:Journal of botany, British and foreign, Volume 34 (1896).djvu/549

 THE student's HANDBOOK OF BRITISH MOSSES. 513 in question, sleeping and eating in their houses with a mixture of perfect confidence and watchfulness. The New Zealand observa- tions are certain to be held to be of particular value. It is interesting to come upon here, as in so many other voyages, records of the observation of pelagic OsciUaturiem, viz., the "sea- sawdust" seen in Torres Straits, the coast of Brazil, and elsewhere. Banks excellently describes it (considering his instruments): "It was formed by innumerable small atoms, each scarcely half a line in length, yet, when looked at under a microscope, consisting of thirty or forty tubes, each hollow and divided throughout the whole length into many cells by small partitions, like the tubes of Conferva. ... A Portuguese, who came on board the ship at Bio de Janeiro, told me that at St. Salvador on the coast of Brazil, where the Portuguese have a whale fishery, he had often seen vast quantities of it taken out of the stomachs of whales or grampuses." The immense masses of diatoms (largely formed of Thalasslosira Nordenskioldll) found in the Arctic seas are known to sailors as "whale's food," though probably the myriads of copepoda, &c., that accompany these shoals and feed on the diatoms are more sustaining to the whale, if there be anything in the name. We have, as Sir Joseph Hooker first pointed out, the greatest diatom masses of all in the Antarctic Sea, and doubtless they are the basis of the food supply at all events of the animal life of that region. However, enough has been said to point out the book as one of pleasurable and profitable reading, not only to naturalists and anthropologists, but to cultivated readers in general. Geoege Murray. llie Student's Handbook of British Mosses. By H. N. Dixon ; with Illustrations, and Keys to the Genera and Species, by the Rev. H. G. Jameson. Eastbourne : V. T. Sumfield. London : JohnWheldon. 1896. Pp. xlvi, 520; 60 plates. Price 18s. 6d. The authors of this bulky addition to our British Moss library have been at pains to define with precision the share which they have respectively taken in its composition. Hence an appreciative or disappointed public will be able to mete out praise or blame to the proper recipients without fear of a miscarriage of justice. The authors are well known in the bryological world — Mr. Dixon as an extremely keen and energetic moss-collector, and Mr. Jameson as the author of an Illustrated Guide to British Mosses, which has an interesting history from the point of view of development. Its original form was a thin pocket-book, privately issued some six or seven years ago, containing a lithographed key to the Mosses. It was too good to be withheld from publication ; so in 1891 it was rewritten and printed in this Journal with a plate illustrative of the technical terms employed; and it was also sold as a separate reprint. In 1893 it was again rewritten and published with fifty-nine plates all drawn by the author with the camera lucida (each structure being magnified to a definite scale uniform throughout), and faithfully representing the importani diagnostic characters of every species.