Book Reviews and Announcements

Some years after the first announcement we eventually saw the appearance of this book. It has been published nicely by Springer, although the lay-out closely resembles that of Plant Cell, Tissue and Organ Culture by Reinert and Bajaj, which was also published by Springer (1977). Because of this resemblance, one sometimes gets the impression to sojourn in the last-called book. Unfortunately, this not only holds for the lay-out. Also the various chapters, paying much attention to the culture of generative plant parts, frequently summarize information which already has been reviewed elsewhere, often by the same authors and sometimes using the same figures. The reader, slightly disappointed, therefore hopes that the promising “experimental” in the book’s title will provide some new view points. On closer inspection, however, one notes that this adjective mainly relates to the testing and improvement of numerous culture conditions. Descriptions of research, using other experimental methods such as histochemistry, autoradiography, microsurgery, electron microscopy and biochemistry, are not or scarcely present. With respect to this, the nearly identical title of the book published by Raghavan in 1976 (Experimental Embryogenesis in Vascular Plants, Academic Press) much better covers the load. A pity; in my opinion a missed change to cover as up to date as possible the fastly-grown stream of new data from these research areas.