Xl INTEODUCTION. 



compilers should be busy at the same time on the same book. 

 And yet it is preposterous on that account to expect of a single 

 writer, that he should bring up the combined Floras of a 

 hundred counties equally to a like late date. 



Take an example in illustration of this. The Flora of Middle- 

 sex, almost the smallest of English counties, has five closely 

 printed pages of " Additions and Corrections " at the end of it : 

 all those petty details, it may be supposed, first becoming known 

 to the two industrious compilers of that work while the book was 

 actually printing, or they would have been made on their proper 

 pages, not entered at the end as A and C. The total area 

 of Britain is not much below three hundred times the area 

 of that one small county ; less than none at all below, if the 

 spaces covered by streets and gardens be allowed for. At a 

 corresponding ratio of three hundred to one, how many pages 

 of "Additions and Corrections" ought to be allowed to the 

 manuscript notes and other data collected for this present com- 

 pilation ? Imagine five closely printed pages of " Additions and 

 Corrections " multiplied three hundred times ! Say, that the 

 five pages include 100 additions or corrections. Multiply these 

 300 times over. Kesult : 30,000 additions and corrections, a 

 number not likely to be discovered while this book is printing. 



With regard to the commoner plants, such as Bellis, Calluna, 

 Prunella, Corylus, and numerous others, which almost certainly 

 occur in every county, and have been actually reported from 

 ninety or a hundred of them. It cannot be held advisable 

 to enumerate the long series of county names and authorities 

 for these generally found plants; thus adding much to the 

 bulk of this work, and exceedingly little to its usefulness. And 

 yet it appears undesirable to leave out of notice entirely any of 

 those generally distributed plants ; the more so because, so soon 

 as this course should begin to be acted upon, a real practical 

 difficulty would spring up in the question, how or where to 

 trace the separating lines between common and not common. 

 Many of the plants which might well be called " common " 



