375 



of being thought English, nor have centuries of political annexation 

 sufficed to make them so, or wholly to supplant the Norman by a 

 Saxon idiom. The race is essentially French, and will ever remain 

 such, their position insures it, and if to themselves, a fortiori to the 

 plants of their islands, which, could they but make themselves heard, 

 would doubtless contend, in the purest dialect of Neustria, for iden- 

 tity of descent with the Norman inhabitants. 



It is true a case may be conceived in which natural geographical 

 relations and proximity must give way to artificial or political circum- 

 stances ; for let us suppose the Channel Islands situated as near to 

 our own coasts as they now are to those of France, and though speak- 

 ing the language and holding the customs of Britain, to have been 

 long annexed to the former country, we could not, practically speak- 

 ing, include them in the English flora, because, forming no part of 

 the English territory, we could assert no right of property in the soil 

 and its productions. Yet theoretically we should have the better 

 claim to the possession of both, and I question much whether this 

 consideration would not so far outweigh the practical view of the mat- 

 ter, as at once to open our eyes to the absurdity we have so long 

 been committing, in the attempted junction of two dissimilar and 

 widely dissevered botanical areas. For my own part, had the island 

 from which I am writing been a province of France from time imme- 

 morial, I should still think its flora but awkwardly assorted with that 

 of Normandy, whilst at the same time, considered abstractedly, or 

 apart from the question of territorial claims, I should see no greater 

 impropriety if, in the construction of a Flora Gallica, the Channel 

 Islands were held as forming a portion of France, than there would be 

 in considering (as I suppose most people do) the Rock of Gibraltar 

 as appertaining to the flora of Spain, though in the occupation of a 

 foreign power. If the French have no political, we have no natural, 

 claim to the Channel Islands, the relations of which to the mother 

 country are as purely colonial as those of Malta or Corfu : this is 

 plain by their many fiscal and legal immunites, the possession of a 

 mixed currency, and their own Norman courts of judicature, &c. 

 They are, in short, not English, either by position or otherwise, and 

 their botanical abandonment is the only course open to us if we would 

 preserve unity and consistency in treating of our national floras* 

 Mais revenons a nos moutons. 



* After all, why cling so fondly to these outlying islands, if to make a bad title to 

 the few peculiar plants they afford he the only motive for non-abandonment, seeing 

 that the greater part of these species have been found on the south-west coasts of 



