ADDITIONAL NOTES, ETC. 477 



scrutinized before being trusted ; the diffuseness of his 

 language, and the discursiveness of his ideas, often com- 

 bining to conceal the fallacies of inference, which greater 

 concentration of thought and expression would have ren- 

 dered obvious to the reader, or might have wholly pre- 

 vented in the wi'iter. I repeatedly dwell on the degi'ee 

 of trust to be given to individual recorders of localities, 

 and take the opijortunity afforded by any special instance 

 much in point, because the credit-worthiness or reliability 

 of the reporter is a very important part in the value of 

 each record. Besides the question of moral confidence in 

 a reporter, there is also to be considered the amount of 

 reliance that can properly be given to his botanical com- 

 petence, or the exactness of his knowledge of plants and 

 theii' names. While beyond these two items in the ac- 

 count, there is still another quality in which many a good 

 botanist is gi'eatly deficient ; namely, the faculty of rea- 

 soning, or the power of di'awing sound conclusions from 

 what he observes, and of logically expressing his facts 

 and conclusions in words, so that his readers may know 

 what he trulj^ means, if themselves competent also to read 

 logically, which assuredly is often far from being the case. 

 Indeed, I should not be at all surprised to hear that va- 

 rious botanists deem Dr. Bromfield's opinion, about Sal- 

 via pratensis being in all probabihty truly indigenous in 

 the Isle of Wight, fully warranted by the circumstances 

 stated. 



802. Mentha rotundifolia, vol. ii. j). 235. 



I am indebted to Mr. J. T. Syme for a specimen from 

 the county of Edinburgh, picked at " Inveresk, Mussel- 

 burgh " ; so that the species really grows there, whether 

 indigenous or not. The locality of " Greenfield " is 

 given in Buxton's Botanical Guide to the plants around 

 Manchester; but perhaps that station is within the county 



