Review

Dr. McClure’s studies on the bamboos date from a period of service in China, at first as an Agricultural Explorer, since 1931 as a Professor of Botany at Lingnan University in Canton. On field trips in the Chinese interior and in Indo-China he collected numerous living bamboos, which were transplanted and studied in the to-day still intact Lingnan Bamboo Garden he had early established. After in 1941 the war had forced him to leave China, he studied living bamboos in the West Indies, Central and South America, and after the war in India, East Pakistan, Java, and Luzon. Being particularly interested not only in morphology, but also in taxonomy, he revised the bamboo collections of several herbaria in the United States and Europe. Proof of his comprehensive knowledge thus acquired is given in his book, which indeed brings the economically important and scientifically interesting, but for various reasons much neglected bamboos into fresh perspective. Students both in pure and applied botany will find here a wealth of information, based on the author’s personal experience as well as on his familiarity with the pertinent literature.