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Notwithstanding the paucity in the issue of first-class scientific books, the appearance of a new volume from the pen of Darwin is always sufficient to create interest. And perhaps of the works which that industrious author has recently published, none is more important than the present work, entitled. "The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the same Species" (London, John Murray). Herein Dr. Darwin has entered into the minutest and fullest investigation of the inner structures of flowers. We now find how abundant are the phenomena of trimorphism and dimorphism (only a few years ago deemed so peculiar and exceptional), and that the number of species bearing cleistogamic flowers is also being added to every day; that the latter structure of flowers, produced by exceptional circumstances, varies from one extreme to the other, and that these extremes are connected by an inosculating series. Thus the Grass Pea (Lathyrus nissolia), bears cleistogamic flowers, which can hardly be told from the ordinary flowers just before the latter finally expand. At the other extreme we find cleistogamic flowers which are actually fertilized beneath the soil, and so are little above the condition of subterranean buds. Dr. Darwin further enters into the sizes and shapes of the pollen-grain produced by different-sized stamens in dimorphic and trimorphic plants. The absolute necessity for crossing to be produced, by the pollen from the flower of one plant being carried to the pistil of another plant, comes out strikingly in Dr. Darwin's experiments; for it is proved that very little is gained by the pistil of a flower being fertilized by the pollen of another flower borne by the same plant. The origin of monœcious and diœcious flowers, of nectaries in flowers, and many other singular and striking botanical peculiarities, are here discussed in the easy but philosophical style for which all the author's books are celebrated. It is truly a rich treat to the botanist to peruse such a book as this, and one to which all our readers who have not yet read it will thank us for attracting their immediate attention.