Botanical Scaling. (Book Reviews: Plant Allometry. The Scaling of Form and Process.)

ost scientists desire to account for a large range of phenomena by the deri- vation of laws or rules from relatively simple underlying principles. Unfortunately, all too often this desire is not fulfilled in ecology and evolutionary biology. Yet, any plant (or for that matter any object) is subjected to the same physical and chemical rules. This makes scaling relations based on these rules very appealing for many because, by their nature, they should be generally applicable. Others may find scaling analysis a simple naive tool contingent of fragile assumptions in the light of the complexity of organisms. The author’s position is clear: ‘. . . the quest for mechanism can be sped on its way by means of scaling analysis’. Niklas deals with a great number of sub jects ranging from molecular traffic within living cells to the evolution of plant life- histories. One of the objectives of this book is to show that, in contrast to the empirical approach to the relations between absolute and relative size, and between organic form and process, scaling relations can be analyti- cally derived. For empirical scaling analysis, the methods and pitfalls of regression analy- sis are amply discussed (a 40-page appendix on methods is added). With regard to ana- lytically derived scaling relations, great care is given to explain how arguments of simili- tude are constructed. By doing so, the book will prove useful both in teaching and in research. In most places, the assumptions made at different steps in the construction of analytically derived scaling relations are discussed and tested with empirical data whenever possible. This approach proves to be very instructive, for instance in the dis- cussion on the ‘surface-area law’, the ‘314 power law for the scaling of growth to body mass’ or the l-3/2 self-thinning rule’. While the latter is still treated in a rather positive