BOTANY 



R. Leathes, the brothers C. J. and Sir James Paget, B. Bray (of Lynn), 

 and the Rev. Kirby Trimmer, and in his own special subject, Diatoms, 

 Frederic Kitton. 



Division of the county for Botanical Purposes. — Unfortunately the 

 watersheds of Norfolk, do not lend themselves to any system of division, 

 and whatever system is adopted will be of necessity purely artificial. Mr. 

 Hewett Cottrell Watson in his Topographical Botany took the first degree 

 of longitude east of Greenwich as the division between east and west 

 Norfolk, his vice-counties, Nos. 27 and 28 : this line, which enters from 

 the north at Blakeney (approximately) and leaves the county at Lopham 

 to the south, divides it into two fairly equal portions, but this division is 

 hardly adequate to show rarity or frequency of the occurrence of species 

 within the county itself, however useful it may be for comparison with 

 the rest of Great Britain. 



In 1864 the Rev. G. Munford in the article ' Botany,' which he 

 wrote for the 3rd edition of White's History of Norfolk, first proposed a 

 division into four portions, which was adopted by the Norfolk and 

 Norwich Naturalists' Society at their first meeting on April 27th, 1869, 

 and has since been used for the society's lists of local flora, which may 

 be described as follows : On the map of Norfolk draw two perpen- 

 dicular lines, one running through Norwich and the other through 

 SwafFham, and connect them by a horizontal line between those two 

 places. This divides the county into two fairly equal central portions, 

 having the division containing the ' Broads ' to the east and that contain- 

 ing the ' Fens ' to the west, and these divisions are called eastern, ' £ ' ; 

 north-central, 'ivc'; south- central, *■ sc' \ and western, '^' These 

 divisions have been indicated by their initial letters for the purposes 

 of the present article. 



Taking the ninth edition of the London Catalogue for our guide we 

 find that the Flora of Great Britain, Ireland, and the Channel Islands 

 contains 1,958 numbered items which we must call ' species,' and if we 

 exclude the genus Rubus, concerning which so much difference of 

 opinion and uncertainty exists and which numbers 99, we shall have 

 1,859 to be accounted for. Of these 1,164 have been recorded as 

 occurring in the county on fairly good authority, and further, if we 

 consider that the genus Hieracium, which numbers in the Catalogue 100 

 species, counts with us for only 5, we find that of the remainder of the 

 species of the whole kingdom we have reason to claim just about two- 

 thirds as having been found within the limits of the county. It must 

 not be supposed that all the species counted are native or indigenous. 

 96 of them are printed in the Catalogue in italics as having no claim to 

 be so regarded, and of the remainder many others belong to the classes 

 which Mr. H. C. Watson described as ' denizen,' ' colonist,' or ' alien,' 

 and a few are ' casuals,' but how readily a ' casual ' or an ' alien ' may 

 become a well-established ' colonist ' or ' denizen,' presenting the appear- 

 ance at first sight of a ' native,' is shown by the instance of Veronica 

 Tournefortii, which first noticed about 1830 has in seventy years become 



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