BOTANY. 



STATISTICS OF VEGETATION. 



Prof. Henfrey, F. R. S., in a recent work on Botany, furnishes the follow- 

 ing curious and interesting statistics of vegetation : 



" Theophrastus (390 B. c.) enumerated 500 kinds of plants, and Pliny U. 

 D. 79), in his 'Historia Naturalis/ increased the number to double. The 

 researches of the Greek, Roman, and Arab naturalists made known no more 

 than 1400 species, and even in the beginning of the seventeenth century the 

 discrimination of the different kinds had only raised the number of distin- 

 guished forms to 0000. 



Humboldt, at the commencement of the present century spoke of 44,000 

 plants, Phanerogamous and Cryptogamous. 



"De Candolle ('Essai Elementaire de Geographic Botanique,' 1820) next 

 calculated that the writings of botanists and the various European collec- 

 tions of dried specimens, might be assumed to contain, together, upwards of 

 56,000 species of plants. In 1820, however, the number of species in the 

 herbarium of the Jardin des Plantes was estimated at the same number, and 

 the collection of M. Benjamin Delessert of Paris was supposed to contain at 

 the time of his death, in 1847, as many as 86,000 species, a number which, 

 about ten years previously, had been conjectured by Lindley to represent the 

 whole of the species existing on the globe (' Introduction to Botany/ second 

 edition, 1835). The Royal Herbarium at Scho'nberg, near Berlin, is estima- 

 ted by Dr. Klotsh to contain 74,000 distinct species. 



"Humboldt ('Aspects of Nature') has entered into some interesting cal- 

 culations to prove how far all these figures fall short of the number of spe- 

 cies of plants which may be supposed to exist. The number of species of 

 flowering plants'named in Loudon's ' Hortus Britannicus' (1832), as at that 

 time, or within a moderate period before, cultivated in Britian, was 26,000 ; 

 the catalogue of species actually under cultivation in the Berlin Garden, 

 carefully prepared by Kunth, gave rather more than 14,060 species, 375 of 

 which were Ferns, leaving 13,685 flowering plants. Among these the follow- 

 ing important Orders were represented : the Compositse by 1,600 species, 

 the Leguminosce by 1150, the Labiatae by 428, the Umbelliferae by 370, the 

 Orchidea? by 460, the Palms by 60, and the Grasses and Cyperaceai by 600 

 species. 



" When these numbers are compared with those of the species of their 

 Orders described in recent works, we find that this Garden contains only 

 l-7th of the Composita3 (about 10,000, De Candolle and Walpers), l-8th of 

 the Leguminosas (8068), and l-9th of the Grasses (Grasses 3544, Cyperaceae 

 2000, Kunth), and of the smaller Orders of Labiatae (2190) and Umbelliferaa 

 (1620), about l-5th or l-4th. 



