NEW PUBLICATIONS. 55 
encouragement from Calcutta or anywhere else ; they get on quite fast 
enough, and heedlessly enough, without either whip or lure. 
Neither can we recommend any tyro to adopt the egotism of print- 
ing his own observations or imagined discoveries off-hand, without 
taking any pains to ascertain whether they are things already on record 
or true novelties worthy of being placed on record for the use and 
benefit of other botanists. The useful fact to the botanical world is, 
not that Mr. Clarke saw and tells something unmentioned in Babing- 
ton's Manual, but that Mr. Clarke detected something worthy of record 
and not already recorded in botanical books. Idle repetitions of mat- 
ters sufficiently well known give inconvenient bulk without increase of 
value to the literature of science. In the case immediately before us, 
it cannot be doubted that the author of the Manual omitted many 
• * 1 
trivial matters for the sake of keeping his book within more conve- 
nient size, while assuredly he did not expect that the authors of comital 
or sectional Floras would feel themselves called upon to supply the 
unimportant omissions. 
In defending his selection of a text book, Mr. Clarke takes occasion 
to supply one omission in the Manual, which rather comes home to the 
writer of this notice ; and as it relates to a matter of considerable 
importance in the statistics of phyto-geography, an examination into 
the soundness of our author's views thereon may be worth the addi- 
tional length it will give to the notice. Mr. Clarke virtually, almost 
literally, declares that his own individual experience in British botany 
constitutes a better measure of the comparative frequency of British 
plants than does the method adopted in the ■ Cybele Britannica.' No 
doubt, a botanist is fully justified in proposing any other method which 
may appear preferable ; and w r e should gladly accept one really more 
exact and certain. But it seems a considerable egotism in any single 
individual to suppose, and to announce to the botanical world, that his 
own personal experience, simply empirical and brief in years, is itseli 
a better test of plant-frequency than one based on the combined re- 
cords, printed and manuscript, of a hundred or more other botanists, 
writing about the plants of a hundred or more different tracts in 
Britain. Our author's own words must be quoted : 
"The ' Cybele Britannica 5 itself, the most elaborate and carefully 
prepared abstract of the kind, founded on unusually numerous obser- 
vations, and corrected by great local experience on the part of the 
