The second volume of »Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien« is presented now in the new format: the book contains an extensive General Part including contributions of different authors specializing in various fields of botany and it is written mainly in English. The first volume of this kind on the family Loganiaceae was published in 1980.

The Ranunculaceae is a moderately large family with 59 genera and ca. 2500 species. Many of these have beautiful flowers or substances with strong physiological activity. They are used as ornamental or medicinal plants. This family shows great diversity in both vegetative and reproductive structures as well as in ecology. It retains many primitive characters and is regarded as one of the most primitive angiospermous families, but on the other hand it often presents quite specialized or advanced features. Therefore the family has attracted attention of many botanists from various points of view, and its members have been studied not only taxonomically, but also morphologically, anatomically, embryologically, palynologically, cytologically, phytochemically, serologically, and so on. Thus the Ranunculaceae are indeed an intensively studied family. The main author of this book, M. Tamura has been studying the family taxonomically for more than 40 years.

In the history of the taxonomic studies of the Ranunculaceae, there were three monumental works. The first is that of A. P. De Candolle. In the first volume of his »Systema Naturale« (1817) the family has been monographed at the species level for the first time. His work was excellent and gave a sound base to the taxonomy of the family and influenced the subsequent work for a long time. The second monograph at the generic level is that of K. Prantl (1888) which appeared in »Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien«. This author used anatomical and embryological characters, in addition to traditional morphological ones for the classification of the family, and tried to make a phylogenetic ...