652 Murray s Northern Flora. 



national floras may be estimated ; for, although the number 

 of plants growing wild in any particular place, county, or 

 kingdom, forms but a small fraction of the number of known 

 species, the generic, and especially the ordinal, proportions 

 are much larger. Consequently, if a botanist be acquainted 

 with the characters of the orders and genera of plants in his 

 own vicinity, he will be thereby able to refer with certainty 

 to their proper families perhaps one half the number in 

 existence, and of these a great proportion to their proper 

 genera. Thus he may not only learn the nature and uses of 

 the species under his immediate observation, but, what is 

 more important, that of all similar plants, or all that agree 

 in having the same ordinal and generic types, amounting to 

 many thousands, wherever and whenever he may have an 

 opportunity of seeing them. 



Moreover, local floras, and catalogues, or lists of plants, 

 supplied by resident collectors, are the chief source from 

 which the materials of more general works are derived. 

 About 200 years ago was published the first local flora extant, 

 by a famous botanist of that period ; viz. Johnson, the editor 

 of Gerarde's English Herbal, and a member of the Apothe- 

 caries' Company. This botanical curiosity is entitled Stir- 

 pium sponte nascentium Emimeratio in Ericeto Hampstediano ; 

 a meagre, but interesting, list, including a fair proportion of 

 the plants then known as genuine English species. He also 

 published accounts of several herborising excursions, ex- 

 tending over various parts of the kingdom. These interest- 

 ing tracts are now as rare as, or rarer than, any of the plants 

 recorded therein. Johnson, who fell in the civil war of that 

 period, was succeeded by Ray, the most illustrious among 

 the promoters of natural science at that period. Ray's 

 Stirpium Synopsis is the first complete account published 

 of our indigenous flora. Blackstone's Harefield Plants, Ja- 

 cobs's Feversham Plants, and Warner's Woodford Catalogue, 

 and some other local lists, were published before the ap- 

 pearance of Hudson's Flora Anglica, the first English flora 

 arranged according to the Linnaean system. The Floras 

 of Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire, the Midland 

 Flora, Tunbridge Flora, &c, subsequently supplied mate- 

 rials for the Flora Britannica, and its successor, the English 

 Flora. 



Since the publication of the English Flora, or since the 

 appearance of the first volume, the Floras of Edinburgh, 

 Berwick, and Devon have been contributed : and it will 

 gratify the botanist to learn that the investigation of local 

 bolany has reached the north and east of Scotland ; a district 



