168 APPENDIX. 



SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS OF THE FLORA. 



EXPLANATOET REMAKES. 



For all purposes of comparison, and as a means of conveying general ideas in botanical 

 geography, the tabular form is indisputably the best, provided the table be intelligibly 

 constructed and its elements easily seized. It is not sufficient to present to the reader 

 one's own deductions without the data from which they were drawn, because no two 

 persons probably would arrive at exactly the same conclusions from the same figures, 

 inasmuch as they do not represent precisely definable quantities. Indeed, figures alone 

 are misleading, and their real meaning can only be extracted by careful analysis. This 

 by way of warning, and as an intimation that we do not too implicitly rely upon mere 

 numbers of species in dealing with the constituents of the Flora. The following Table 

 is a summary of an incomparably more extended one showing the distribution of each 

 species, and very much too long and detailed for publication, as it would make a thick 

 volume in itself. In abridging it to the reduced form here presented, no pains have 

 been spared to attain the greatest possible degree of accuracy. A considerable number 

 of proposed genera which were not recognized by Bentham and Hooker, nor by our- 

 selves, are excluded; and no fewer than 1075 obscure species eliminated from the 

 calculations now offered. The main consequence of these reductions is to lower the 

 proportion of endemic species, with the advantage, probably, of bringing it nearer to 

 what it really is in Nature. In all the large orders some species have been cancelled ; 

 but the bulk of the rejected ones belong to a few of the earlier orders which have not 

 been recently monographed, and to the Gramineae and Filices, of which the Mexican 

 forms have lately been monographed, and the species, according to our views, unduly 

 multiplied. As an illustration of the extent to which this rectification, if we may so 

 term it, has been carried, it may be mentioned that the Malvaceae suffer a reduction of 

 one quarter of the species contained in the enumeration, and five of the genera are not 

 counted, either because they are doubtful or because they are represented within our 

 limits by cultivated species only. All cultivated plants have been left out of consider- 

 ation, even such as are probably or certainly indigenous ; likewise a number of cosmo- 

 politan plants, which are of little interest from a geographical standpoint. The genus 

 Solarium is another instance in which there is a great difference between the number of 

 species enumerated and the number admitted in our comparisons, the reduction being 

 from 139 to 100. Even after making all these reductions we feel convinced that many 

 spurious species remain ; but, judging from the percentage of distinct new species in 

 recent collections, they are probably more than counterbalanced by unrecorded species. 

 These observations refer almost exclusively to the Mexican flora *. 



* As an example of what remains to be done, we may mention that, just as we are going to press, Mr. Sereno 

 Watson sends us an Enumeration of Plants collected by Dr. E. Palmer in the State of Jalisco in 1886. It com- 

 prises about 675 species, whereof 104 are described as new ; and there are three new genera. 



