170 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



SCOTTISH RUBI. 

 By Prof. JAMES W. H. TRAIL, A.M., M.D., F.R.S. 



THE genus Rubus has within recent years been the subject 

 of careful revision (especially in England and Wales), with the 

 aim of determining the relations of the forms that exist in 

 Britain to these of the continent of Europe. Many changes 

 have had to be accepted in the nomenclature ; and several 

 new forms have been recognised as distinct from those 

 already named or known as British. Foremost among 

 British students of Rubi is the Rev. W. Moyle Rogers, F.L.S., 

 to whose papers in the "Journal of Botany," followed by 

 the "Handbook of British Rubi" in 1900, we owe most of 

 the great recent advance in this study. Mr. Rogers has 

 added to the debt under which these publications has laid 

 us by his readiness to examine and name the collections of 

 other botanists, who have frequently benefited by his kind- 

 ness. We in Scotland have to thank Mr. Rogers also for 

 the great additions he has made to our records of Rubi in 

 Perthshire and in several counties of the west and south- 

 west of Scotland, the lists for those counties alone approach- 

 ing fulness. 



In a recent paper in the " Journal of Botany " Mr. Rogers 

 has summed up our present knowledge of the distribution of 

 the genus in Great Britain and Ireland. Though the 

 Scottish lists are much extended since those in the second 

 edition of Watson's " Topographical Botany," published in 

 1883, they are still very meagre, and prove that there is 

 yet much to be done. We cannot expect that many forms 

 will be found in the islands and the northern counties, yet 

 even in them additions should reward a careful search. Mr. 

 Rogers has shown how much richer in forms the counties 



o 



visited by him are than might have been anticipated from 

 previous records ; and no doubt in all the other southern 

 and midland counties many unrecorded forms occur. 



Of the 1 69 forms of Rubi that have been distinguished 

 in the British Islands, only 65 are known with certainty 

 from Scotland, in marked contrast to the 164 that have 

 been met with in the southern half of England (121 of 



