54 NEW PUBLICATIONS. 
a difference, even a very trifling difference, in his specimens, the fact is 
intimated by some remark or description of his own. This is a judi- 
cious course in the writer of a very local Flora, more especially so when 
the writer is comparatively a tyro in botany, as we take to be the case 
here. We cannot see that his selection of the Manual for a text-book 
required the apologetic defence of some pages, which is introduced 
under the head of " The Standard of Reference Selected." His reasons 
for adapting his own list of Andover plants to that text-book are thus 
finally summed up : — 
" Among manuals I have chosen Professor Babington's, as carrying 
the subdivision of forms further than any other popular English 
manual. This is a great advantage for local purposes, where the 
slightest differences are worthy of notice, and general principles of 
classification are not under consideration. Nothing is trivial in nature. 
We have learnt from Mr. Darwin that ' lumpers ' have often [?] united 
plants separated by wide physiological differences, as Habenaria bifolia 
and H. chlorantha. Botanical triumphs have been chiefly won by 
minute correctness of observation, and often of details the value of 
which was unsuspected at the time. It is quite possible that an ob- 
server may do good work by making a very bad species ; as if some 
one had formerly entered the pin-eyed and thumb-eyed Primroses as 
two different species. In this Andover list I have inserted every re- 
mark which has occurred to me, omitting no observation as trivial, and 
have never spent time in trying to discover that no one has made the 
same observation before. If the observation is not included in the 
description and remarks of Babington's Manual, I have often reprinted 
it from Smith or other authority." 
Of course we dissent from the bizarre notion of any botanist doing 
" good work by making a very bad species." Be it observed, our 
author gives no explanation as to the kind of good likely to result 
from the folly of so making two very bad species, on variations in the 
comparative length of stamens and pistils. The fact of such dif- 
ferences might be just as well known, and much better announced, 
without making very bad species founded solely thereon. Florist cul- 
tivators of the Auricula and Polyanthus have long enough been fami- 
liar with the variation, and perfectly aware that the differences were not 
specific, but would reappear among plants raised from the seeds of one 
single root. Certainly, our present makers of bad species require no 
