1 886-8 7.] Opening Address. 9 



botanist to keep in mind that common plants, owing to their 

 wider distribution, are much more useful to the topographical 

 botanist to draw inferences from than rare plants that are 

 found sparsely scattered over isolated areas widely separated 

 from each other. 



Of the older field botanists who worked in Scotland, perhaps 

 no one, according to the standard of his time, was more accurate 

 in his observations than Dr John Lightfoot, author of the 'Flora 

 Scotica,' published in 1777. He sometimes visited a locality 

 and noted very few plants, but he made a record of those that 

 were common as well as rare. He had the faculty of taking 

 in, as it were, at a glance, what were the most striking botanical 

 features of a locality, and recorded them. I have more than 

 once had most surprising instances of his faculty of coming 

 across uncommon forms that would have been overlooked by 

 most botanists, had they been such a short time as he was at 

 some of the places he visited. The season I began to record the 

 flora of the island of Colonsay I found Orchis pyramidalis, and 

 when I returned home was told that it was the first record 

 of that plant in the west of Scotland. One day I was look- 

 ing over the 'Flora Scotica,' when I observed, to my surprise, 

 that Dr Lightfoot had found the plant growing more than a 

 hundred years before at or near the same place where I had re- 

 discovered it. Later I found another station for the same plant 

 on the island of Oronsay ; and I believe that these are, up to 

 the present time, the only two stations known for Orchis pyra- 

 midalis in the extreme west of Scotland. At both stations 

 the plant grows on sandy soil in the midst of a rabbit-warren, 

 and these animals seem to have a great liking for the succulent 

 leaves and stem of the orchis, which they generally eat down 

 close to the ground, so that it is easily overlooked. Two years 

 ago I had further evidence, at the island of Eum, of the per- 

 sistence of plants at stations where undisturbed, and also 

 additional proof of the accuracy of Lightfoot's work. With 

 the aid of the information given in the 'Flora Scotica' and the 

 routes mentioned by Pennant (' Voyages and Travels,' vol. iii, 

 pp. 312-315), I was able to go over most of the ground visited 

 by Lightfoot. As I came upon the plants where he noted 

 them, one after another, I gazed upon the descendants of the 

 flora of 1772 with most peculiar feelings. Perhaps no botanist 



