284 The Irish Nahiralist. 



the impersonal and irresponsible habitat, and thus makes him- 

 self answerable for every species and every station recorded. 

 Some rigid critics may be inclined to hold that Wade has 

 much to answer for. In several instances, no doubt, he has 

 found what no other botanist has found after him ; in a few, he 

 has recorded what there is strong reason to believe never grew 

 in the county. But it is very easy from the height of our 

 modern advantages to look down with too censorious eyes on 

 the labours of the earlier botanists. 



After Wade's Catalogue, which excluded the sedges and 

 ferns, deferred to a Second Part, never published, no fresh 

 attempt at a Co. Dublin Flora was made. Wade himself gave 

 many new localities for the county in his Plantae Rariores 

 (1804). In Mackay's Catalogues of Irish Plants (1806-25) ; in 

 the Irish Flora of I^ady Kane (1833) ; the Flora Hibernica of 

 Mackay (1836) ; the Cybele Hiber^iica of Moore and More 

 (1866), and the British Association Guide to the County Dublin 

 (1878), many others were added ; and, finally, in Mr. H. C. 

 Hart's Flora of Howth (1887), a section of the county and, 

 perhaps, the richest of all, had its botany worked out in detail. 

 To this last work an appendix of Co. Dublin plants found 

 outside the Howth peninsula was added, sufficiently full to 

 enable the student to make a rough estimate of the extent, in 

 species, of the local county flora. 



It will thus be seen that for many years much scattered 

 material had existed with which the foundations, at least, of an 

 exhaustive Co. Dublin Flora might be laid. But, so far, no 

 one had been tempted to utilize this material for such a 

 purpose when some eighteen months ago it occurred to me 

 that a systematic botanical survey of the entire county was 

 for many reasons a task worth undertaking. The work was 

 accordingly begun without delay, as soon, in fact, as I had 

 laid down on the one-inch Ordnance maps the artificial divi- 

 sions of the field of inquiry indispensable for the proper study 

 of distribution. Such a survey, as every practical botanist 

 well knows, is necessarily a tedious one if done at all thoroughly; 

 yet the steady devotion to the work of the leisure moments of 

 the past two seasons has already accomplished this much — it 

 has enabled me to form a just estimate of the distribution of a 

 majority of the Co. Dublin species, and to collect a consider- 

 able mass of evidence bearing on the difficult problem of the 

 relations between plants and soils. 



