August, 1901. !49 



IRISH TOPOGRAPHICAL BOTANY. 



BY C. B. MOFFAT. 



It is a pleasure to welcome the appearance of Mr. Praeger's 

 long-projected " Irish Topographical Botany," 1 the pre- 

 paration of which has entailed on its author an expenditure of 

 time and energy such as few can realise. In his preface Mr. 

 Praeger claims for his work that it forms " forty exceedingly 

 condensed county floras," and the claim is fulfy justified when 

 the contents of the book are examined. This is more— and a good 

 deal more — than we had a right to expect from the title ; for 

 Watson's " Topographical Botany," in setting out the comital 

 distribution of plants in Great Britain, stopped far short of 

 what Mr. Praeger has done. Mr. Watson gave for each species 

 (except very common ones) a list of the counties for which it 

 had been recorded, naming his authority for the record in 

 each case. No localities, however, were mentioned, nor was 

 any attempt made to estimate a plant's frequency or rarity in the 

 different counties separate!} . Mr. Praeger goes carefully into 

 details of this kind ; he makes it a rule (except in the case of the 

 most universally distributed species) to give at least o?ie locality 

 in each county for every plant, often adding two or three for the 

 more interesting, and always indicating at the same time 

 whether other localities are on record or not, as well as whether 

 the plant is frequent, local, or scarce in the county. In most 

 cases, too, an interesting short note on the general character 

 of the range is appended to the list of county records. Thus 

 every page in the volume is replete with interest to botanists, 

 and the work is in no sense a mere index to existing records, 

 as Watson's to a considerable extent was. 



The author purposely refrains from going over ground which 

 has already been traversed by the editors of the Cybele 

 Hibernica> stating that he wishes his .book to be regarded and 

 used as a companion or supplement to that standard work on 

 Irish botany. This principle of companionship to Cybele 

 Hibernica has in some respects been carried to lengths that 

 will rather surprise those who read Mr. Praeger's review of 



1 Irish Topographical Botany. Compiled largely from original 

 material. By R. 1,1,0 yd Praijgrr, B.A., B.K., M.R.I. A. Proc. R.I.A. 

 (3) vol. vii., 1901, pp. clxxxviii + 410, 6 maps. Price, km. 



