204 BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 
coasts: we may find the nearest approximation towards it, 
around the bleak summits of our Highland mountains. 
It would be tedious to write down the many species, or 
even the genera or orders, of the British flora, which are 
wholly absent, and many of them far absent, from the Polar 
lands. ‘These negative characters of the latter are too nume- 
rous for specification. Let us adopt the opposite course, and 
seek for resemblances between the productions of countries 
so widely distant. All the nineteen orders, under which the 
plants of the Polar flora are arranged in preceding pages, 
are common to the two sections—the Polar Coasts and 
the British Isles. So far there is a strong affinity; the 
difference on the side of the Polar botany being nega- 
tive, or shown only by the absence of other orders more 
liberally supplied to the British Isles. But sameness in 
the orders of plants is of course compatible with much less 
similitude in the subordinate groups; and when we look to. 
the fifty-seven genera of the Polar flora, we arrive at positive 
characters of difference, since eleven of these genera have no 
species to represent them in the British flora. And on coming 
to the more exact comparison of species, we see that nearly 
two-thirds of the Polar species are unknown among the 
native plants of the British Isles. Apparently, somewhere 
between thirty-five and forty species are common to the 
two sections ; that is, more or less, according to the ultimate 
decision respecting the identity of some undetermined spe- 
cies, the individuals of which differ so much in Polar and 
British latitudes, that their identity, as species, is ronde 
doubtful,” 
* * * * * 
British and Azoric Botany.—** On thus comparing the lists 
of species, now found wild in the two groups of islands, and 
seeing that more than one-half of those which have been 
ascertained to grow in the Azores, are native or naturalized 
in the British Isles, it might at first appear that the botanical — 
features of the two countries must bear a much closer resem- 
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ye ye tee Le 
