INTRODUCTION. XXXV11 



of the Journal's rule should be disclaimed by Mr. Baker him- 

 self; it being a rule well adapted only to those writers who 

 seek to expand their own minimum additions to science into a 

 maximum of printed text ; while it becomes ridiculously inap- 

 plicable to those who seek to compress the information they 

 include on the opposite principle, on that of making up a 

 multum in parvo. 



This book is not the Flora of one little county, which has 

 to be inflated to a volume of four or five hundred pages, on the 

 rake-up and repeat- over- again principle. On the contrary, its 

 leading purpose is to adduce and arrange original personal 

 testimony in a very condensed form ; repetitions from books 

 being resorted to only where such more direct testimony may 

 fail. If the county so certified afresh had been previously 

 recorded on other authority, then the adduced testimony 

 becomes so far an added evidence for the correctness of the 

 earlier record ; with the further advantage of shewing the 

 persistence of the plant in the same habitat or county. If not 

 previously on printed record, then the habitat so testified is of 

 course an addition to accumulated knowledge on the subject. 

 As to mere priority in seeing a plant in a place, the mind which 

 can find importance in a matter so small, must itself be a very 

 small mind indeed. 



It has happened in various instances, that botanists have 

 kindly sent to the compiler local lists or manuscript notes, 

 and afterwards have themselves given printed currency to the 

 same. In several of these cases the lists and manuscripts will 

 still be used, and be quoted here as if original; although in 

 some sense they have ceased to be so, and might now be left 

 unquoted. Thus, Professor Lawson gave the compiler a list of 

 plants observed in the Isle of Skye by himself and the Kev. 

 II. E. Fox, and afterwards printed the same for general use. 

 In like manner, Professor Balfour long ago supplied lists of 

 plants observed by himself in Isla and Cantire, which were also 

 subsequently printed in a periodical. And the same is the case 



