580.(42.23) aol 
II 
Botanical Work Wanting Workers 
HE field for investigation in botanical work is so extensive and 
increases so rapidly every year,as new discoveries open up new 
vistas of possible knowledge, that it will, doubtless, have been taken 
for granted that the title of this paper can refer only to those 
branches of the subject in which this Association is especially inter- 
ested, viz., the flora of the four South Eastern Counties. Of these 
four counties I have limited myself to the County of Kent, as being 
the one with which I am most familiar, and as best serving my pur- 
pose, although the following remarks will probably apply with equal 
force to the other counties. 
An examination of the various county floras that have already been 
published shows that the flowering plants have, as a rule, received uch 
more attention than the cryptogams, and that in very few instances 
have adequate county lists of Mosses, Lichens, Fungi, or Algae 
been published. Such as have appeared are usually imperfect in 
one or other of the groups, especially as regards dates and localities, 
the Mosses and Fungi being generally those best represented. It 
is therefore this branch of botanical work which specially needs 
workers, and to which I wish to direct particular attention. A 
Flora of Kent is, I understand, now going to press, but includes at 
present only the flowering plants. 
About twenty years ago an attempt was made to collate the 
various cryptogamic lists existing in small local floras, or in pub- 
lished reports of Kentish Natural History Societies, and to render 
them as complete as possible by further personal investigations. The 
results obtained were published by myself, so far as the mosses, scale- 
mosses, and lichens were concerned, in the Journal of Botany for 1877 
and 1878, and my friend Mr T. Howse kindly undertook to add to 
and complete the manuscript list of Fungi, which I had in prepara- 
tion. He subsequently published it in the same journal in 
1879. But the marine and fresh-water Algae still remain to be 
worked out. The object in publishing these lists, in their admittedly 
incomplete state, was to induce isolated workers in different parts 
of the county to contribute such information as they might have 
accumulated. But except by those who were already working at 
* A paper read before the S.E, Union of Scientific Societies, meeting at Croydon, on 
June 4, 1898. 
