VIII. 



THE FORMATION OF NEW LAND 



BY VARIOUS PLANTS. 



By G. F. Scott Elliot, M.A., B.Sc, F.L.S., F.R.G.S. 



(Paper read 2nd June, i8gg.) 



The few remarks which I have to offer to-night deal with one of 

 those new departures in Biology which have, so far, not succeeded 

 in obtaining a firm footing in British Botany ; neither text-books, 

 the laboratory worker, nor even the out-of-door botanist, as a rule, 

 pay any attention to the fact that wherever ground with a definite, 

 more or less uniform environment exists, there we find a certain 

 set of plants adapted to live together under those special conditions. 

 Each has its own part to play in the state in which providence has 

 placed it. This is true of every single plant in a meadow or wood, 

 and there is the same differentiation of function even in a marsh or 

 open water. Each of these organisms, the wood, the meadow, 

 and the loch, is a plant-association or vegetable community, and 

 is as much a subject for biological inquiry as a single species is a 

 subject of investigation. 



But — and here I think that the current systems of Warming 

 {Lehrbuch der Oechologischen Pflanzengeographie. Berlin, 1896) 

 and others are unsatisfactory — at the boundary between the 

 loch and the meadow or between the latter and the forest, there is 

 a series of parallel belts of plants which lead by slow gradations 

 from one well marked association to the other. These fringing 

 plants, which are included by Warming as separate plant communi- 

 ties or associations, should, I think, be considered simply as neutral 

 belts. It is impossible to show them on a map except with an 

 absurdly small scale, and the introduction of so many separate 

 associations leads, I think, to needless confusion and complication. 



