76 On the Orif/in and Distribution of the British Flora. 



group of plants, including the gorses, broom, and allied 

 plants, Lobelias, Gladiolus, Sibthorpias, and heaths, which are 

 " more nearly allied to corresponding Cape species than they 

 are to each other." The severity of the winter checks the 

 extension of these plants to the East ; and they seem to have 

 travelled from Natal to Abyssinia, and from thence to the 

 Cameroons and the Atlas Mountains. This migration may 

 have taken place x^artly as a return current at the close of a 

 glacial period ; but it would seem more probable that some 

 of these plants, now confined to Portugal, the Asturian 

 Mountains of the north of Spain, and Ireland, are the relics 

 of a still earlier migration, probably Miocene. Ireland may 

 not have been so entirely submerged in glacial times as Great 

 Britain. 



The earliest botanical work of Mr. Hewett Watson was a 

 pamphlet entitled ' Outlines of the Geographical distribution 

 of British plants,' printed in 1832, in which he groups our 

 flora under eight types of distribution, namely, British, 

 English, Intermediate, Scottish, Highland, Germanic, At- 

 lantic, and Local or doubtful. At the Cambridge meeting 

 of the British Association, in the following year. Professor 

 Edward Forbes, with his characteristic acumen, stated in- 

 dependently conclusions almost identical. ^^ The plants of 

 Watson's British, English, Intermediate, and Scottish tyi^es 

 Forbes grouped under the name of Germanic. Those termed 

 by Watson " Germanic " plants, found in the East and South- 

 East of England, and mainly affecting a limestone or chalky 

 soil, he termed Kentish ; whilst of the seventy species con- 

 stituting Watson's Atlantic group he separated eleven, namely, 

 six species of Saxifrage, two heaths, Arbutus, Menziesia, 

 Arabisciliata, occurring in Ireland, under the name of 

 Asturian, fi-om then- nearest continental habitat ; terming 

 the remainder Armorican, from their affinity to the flora of 

 Normandy and Brittany. Disregarding the accidentally 

 associated Kentish group, and putting on one side the Local 



25 Aftervrards elaborated into his memoir ' On the connexion between 

 the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles and the Geographical 

 Changes which have affected their Area.' — Mem. Geol. Survey, vol. i. 336. 



