BRITISH BOTANY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 18? 



characters given in Hooker & Arnott's British Flora and Babington's 

 Manual, or with detailed descriptions in some of the best local 

 floras ; that they had been verified upon continental specimens, and 

 checked by the examination of living specimens ; and that he had 

 "availed himself of numerous and repeated observations made 

 during forty years' herborizations in various parts of Europe." 

 The result of his labours certainly was the production of a most 

 attractive introduction to the study of the British Flora, freed from 

 every unnecessary difficulty. As to his method of treatment of 

 species, he says: — "It will no doubt be matter of astonishment 

 that whilst the last edition of Hooker & Arnott's Flora (1855) con- 

 tains 1571 species, and that of Babington's Manual (1856) as many 

 as 1708 (exclusive of Chara), that number is in the present work 

 reduced to 1285. This is not owing to any real difference of 

 opinion as to the richness and diversity of our vegetable produc- 

 tions, but is occasioned by a different appreciation of the value of 

 the species themselves." Accordingly he greatly reduces the 

 number of brambles, roses, hawkweeds, and willows which had been 

 separately described by Babington and others, and also lumps 

 together many species in the other genera — e. g. the Batrachian 

 Ranunculi, which he includes under the single name R. aquatiUs. 

 Such treatment of closely allied species is, no doubt, eminently 

 desirable in a book meant for the beginner. 



In reviewing this Handbook a word of praise must be added for 

 its excellent analytical keys to the natural orders, and also to each 

 important genus. The plates of FntjUsh Botany are referred to 

 throughout. Bentham's Handbook, together with a few good life- 

 sized outline drawings of about one hundred of the plants most 

 likely to be met with by a beginner (which latter is, in my opinion, 

 still a desideratum in the literature of British botany), would be 

 worth their weight in gold to anyone wanting an inducement to 

 take up some branch of natural science. Such plates would make 

 the first identifications easy, and afterwards the Handbook alone 

 would be sufficient. There is also an illustrated edition of this 

 Handbook, but the figures are very small. 



In 1863 was commenced a very important work, being a new 

 edition of Smith & Sowerby's English Botany, with entirely fresh 

 descriptions of the genera and species by J. T. Boswell Syme. The 

 plates are reproductions of those in the original, with new ones for 

 species since discovered, and the colourmg of them by hand is very 

 inferior ; Syme's descriptions, however, are valuable. Here again 

 the work is too well-known to require a detailed description. In 

 the same year was commenced the Journal of Botany, British and 

 Foreign, under the editorship of Berthold Seemann, and it has 

 continued under different editors to the present time. 



During the latter part of the century the works in some way 

 connected with British botany have been so numerous that I can 

 only select a few for notice. 



Daniel Oliver's Lessons in Elementary Botany (1864) is a useful 

 book for a beginner ; and in 1866 Messrs. D. Moore and A. G. More 

 commenced to publish their Cybele Hibemica, or Outlines of the 



Journal of Botany.— -Vol. 39. [April, lUOl.] l 



