2 2 STEWART AND CORRY'S FLORA OF N.E. IRELAND. 



county in which each place is situate is not stated. This last omission 

 is doubly regrettable since no Map accompanies the book, and when 

 Belfast (lying near the boundary of two counties) is the pointer, con- 

 sultation of a map is compulsory. Then there is an alphabetical 

 Index to genera (only) of the Phanerogams ; then another to the 

 common and local English names of species ; next a separate index 

 to both genera and species of Mosses and Hepatics ; and, finally, a 

 fifth index to certain 'Excluded Plants' — some 270 kinds of both 

 classes — which are placed by themselves in a sort of Appendix filling 

 nigh forty pages, under the separate heads of non-natives and 

 presumed erroneous records. This relegation of Aliens, etc., to an 

 addendum gives the user of the book needless trouble ; small type 

 and brackets would have kept the discarded items sufficiently distinct 

 in the body of the work ; those consulting the book to see if a 

 particular plant is absent, or rare, alien or what not, are, as it is, 

 compelled to make two or more references, which, if they lead to 

 impatience, are apt to result in uncertainty, or what may be worse — 

 false inferences. 



A careful examination of the matter of the work affords much 

 curious information, some of it new to us, as for example the 

 statement that the close relation and general likeness between the 

 flora of the North-East of Ireland and that of Southern Scotland is 

 more fanciful than real, and not borne out on close scrutiny (p. xxx). 

 We had thought somewhat differently ; and, indeed, if the known 

 plants of the adjacent south-west corner of Scotia (its counties from 

 Ayr to Dumfries, with Moffat, Arran, and Cantyre), as far as the 

 comital records of Topographical Botany speak, be compared with 

 the list in the present flora, a great similarity is revealed : both areas 

 lack any high mountains, have much igneous or basaltic rock at the 

 surface, little development of limestone, much bog and rolling 

 moorland, and both alike are largely overlaid with drift in parts. As 

 might be inferred almost from the above, the flora is not particularly 

 rich, though the sub-xerophilous group of plants that seem to affect 

 basalt especially, give variety and interest ; strict alpines may once 

 have existed on the higher ridges but are now rare ; limestone loving 

 species like Ge?itiana Amarella, Chlora, and Campanula glomerata 

 are wanting because calcareous rock is wanting ; and not one plant 

 of Watson's ' Germanic ' type seems to have spread from East Anglia 

 and successfully made good its invasion. Still, when all supposed 

 limiting or favouring circumstances have been taken into account, 

 there remains much that is interestingly inexplicable or provokingly 

 suggestive, in many of the proved facts of Absences or Presences on 

 record. With our limited space, however, it is only possible for us to 



Naturalist, 



