i85 



THE FATHERS OF YORKSHIRE BOTANY. 



BY 



JOHN GILBERT BAKER, F.R.S., F.L.S., 



Of the Royal Herbarium, Kew, 

 President of the Yorkshire Naturalists' Union ; 



BEING 



the presidential address for 1883, delivered at barnsley, march 4th, 1884. 



I should like some day to see the different Natural History 

 Associations in the North of England join hands and get to- 

 gether a readable sketch of the progress of Natural History in 

 our six northern counties. For want of such a record I am 

 afraid that the men of to-day know very little of the history of 

 how and by whom the accumulated knowledge of which we 

 have possession at the present time has been worked out and 

 brought together. If the two thousand members of the York- 

 shire NaturaUsts' Union had to go up for one of those examina- 

 tions which are so common now-a-days, and the question was 

 asked : ' Name the Yorkshiremen who have been eminent in 

 Natural History up to the end of the eighteenth century, and 

 give the titles of their principal writings,' I wonder how many 

 of us would be able to score twenty-five per cent of the total 

 attainable number of marks. I do not think that a great many 

 would ; and this state of things is almost inevitable from the 

 nature of the case. Our sciences are so full of detail and they 

 march forward so fast. A good paper is published in a periodi- 

 cal or in the report or transactions of some society ; the 

 pith of it is soon absorbed into some general work : in Botany, 

 into a general flora of the island, like Hooker's or Babington's, 

 or a handbook of some special order in the cryptogamia, or a 

 record of localities into a county flora ; and these are again 

 condensed into the general epitomes of the botany of the whole 



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