The Soulhern Element in the British Flora. 511 



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of the island, in contradistinction to the eastern or Germanic side. Al- 

 though there may exist other reasons for especially denominat- 

 ing some of these the ^Atlantic species«, the name of the type 

 will be here understood as having reference only to their distri- 

 bution within Britain itself, and by itself«. (The spacing is mine). 

 This limitation of the term > Atlantic* to the circumstance of a western 

 distribution within Britain — and the same applies more or less to the 

 definitions of Watson's other types of distribution — was unfortunate in 

 so far as it tended towards a onesided conception of the British flora as 

 a detached unit. His » types of distribution* may be in order in his 

 scheme of topographical statistics; to some extent they are also expressive 

 of certain ecological conditions that determine their hmits. But if we try 

 to make them the basis for working out the relation of the British flora 

 to the floras of the European Continent, or for tracing its history they 

 break down. It is evident that for that purpose we have to treat it as 

 a section of the flora of Western Europe whose history it has shared and 

 out of which it has recruited itself. This was the standpoint of Edward 

 Forbes (6) in his brilliant memoir >0n the Connexion between the Distri- 

 bution of the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles, and the Geo- 

 logical changes which have afl*ected their area, especially during the epoch 

 of the Northern Drift*, published as long ago as 1846. To him the British 

 flora was made up of 5 subfloras, all derived from difl^erent quarters of 

 the European mainland. Two of them, the Asturian and the Gallican or 

 I Norman floras correspond to Watson s > Atlantic type «. Forbes enumerates 



e species which in his opinion belong to the Asturian flora. Reduced 

 to the modern conception of those species they are nine in number. Of 

 ine »Norman« type he quotes merely examples, and so he also does for 

 the ^Kentish* or :^North French<c flora which forms part of Watson's 

 Germanic and English types, but is treated as a Southern type. These 

 ists were drawn up rather loosely and being moreover incomplete they 

 found practically no consideration in the numerous British local floras. 

 Iney rather based their classifications into types of distribution on Watson's 

 work which had at least the advantage of definiteness and completeness. 



More recently, in 1899, Mr. CI. IIeid, in his ^Origin of the British 



lora«: spoke of certain British plants as Iberian, Lusitanian and Pyrenean, 



whilst in his Portsmouth address he uses such terms as ^^Atlantic or Lu- 



suanian plants*, ^Atlantic element*, ^Pyrenean element* and »Lusitanian 



orac as if they were synonymous. No definition of the terms is given, 



from the half dozen names he quotes it appears that he meant species 

 ^hich outside the British Isles w^ere, as he thought, confined to the Pyre- 

 ^ees or the North of Spain or the Iberian or Pyrenean peninsula generally. 



So much as to Watson's term :^ Atlantic typf'« and the more loosely 



descriptions Norman, Asturian, Iberian, Lusitanian and Pyrenean, But 



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