REVIEWS—GEOLOGY OF EAST SOMERSET, ETC. 69 
nt 
clearly set before us. The price of the work compares favourably with 
that of several Survey memoirs lately published, a fact which we suspect 
is also owing to the author’s care in the preparation of his manuscript, 
so as to avoid those subsequent alterations which add so greatly to the 
cost of printing. It was said of Sir Roderick Murchison that he “ wrote 
in type,” and it may be that some of the officers of the Survey imitate 
their late illustrious leader in this respect. 
W. J. H. 
Botanical Locality Record Club. Report of the Recorder for 1877, with 
Quinquennial Appendix, 1873-7. London: West, Newman, and Co., 
1878. 
TuE part now issued completes the first quinquennial volume of the 
Reports of this Club, and appended to it is a summary of all the new 
county-records published by the members of this and the Botanical 
Exchange Clubs, up to the end of 1877. The five reports and appendix 
will form a volume of 308 pages, containing a mass of information upon 
the horizontal and (occasionally) the altitudinal range of British plants, 
additional to that comprised in Watson’s “‘ Topographical Botany.” The 
greater part of these additions has its origin in the breaking up, since the 
time when the details of that work were collected, of many of the old 
so-called variable species into numerous ‘ segregate” forms, the distribu- 
tion of each of which required investigating afresh. But, besides these, 
there are, in fact, new county-records for such plants as Campanula 
rotundifolia and Mercurialis perennis, in cases where (e.g.,in South 
Somerset and Leicestershire) one would have thought there must have 
been abundant evidence of their occurrence. This serves to show that 
there is still work to do before the distribution of common and well- 
marked species will be fully known, to say nothing of the newer 
segregates, in regard to which little has yet been done. 
By some the utility of such investigations is doubted, and it may be, 
perhaps, admitted that there is very little probability of any practical result 
from them, but still enquiries of this kind throw light upon questions of 
great geologic and biologic interest, and on that account approve them- 
selves to those to whom the pursuit of knowledge, merely as knowledge, 
is fascinating. The theories of Edward Forbes upon the succession of 
Florasin Great Britain, and the classification of the British plants into 
types by Hewett C. Watson, are very little known to the average 
botanical student; but that is, I apprehend, owing to the absence of any 
ready access tothem. So long as this knowledge is shut up in books 
which can be obtained only with difficulty, it is scarcely possible to 
expect any wide-spread acquaintance with it. Mr. Watson at one time 
complained that ‘there are hardly fifty botanists in England who 
sufficiently comprehend the philosophy of plant-distribution to take any 
living interest ” in the work which the Record Club pursues. This 
estimate is, of course, now far too small, but the number would be much 
increased if there were more easy means of learning what is already 
known or imagined concerning the “ philosophy of plant-distribution.” 
