426 



X. GENERAL REMARKS. 



And one constant and insurmountable objection against 

 all such ordinal statistics, when proposed as representa- 

 tions of the realities of nature, lies in the fact above 

 adverted to, that the abundance and prevalence of indi- 

 vidual species become more or less veiled, by thus 

 looking at nature through descriptive arrangements in 

 books. If our ordinal statistics are floral, the greater 

 size and frequency of some species are made to count as 

 nothing in the scale. If our statistics are vegetal, the 

 grandeur and frequency of some species, becoming ave- 

 raged with the smallness and rarity of others, are still 

 made to tell too imperfectly in the joint result. The vast 

 abundance of Bellis and Taraxacum becomes lost, so to 

 write, by being halved with the rarity of Diotis and Chry- 

 socoma. And in the order to which those plants belong, 

 the avei'age frequency' must be unduly reduced by the 

 book-fiction of doublmg the species of Hieracium ; that 

 is, by segregating them on a different principle from that 

 followed in dividing other genera of the same order into 

 species. 



A more detailed idea of the vegetal features of Britain, 

 and proportionally more precise, may be obtained by 

 looking over the ' census of species,' where natural and 

 book species are taken singly, not grouped into orders, 

 and their places in the census list are determined by the 

 frequency of their repetition in the comital floras. Very 

 high in that census list stand the names of Plantago lan- 

 ceolata and major, nos. 1 and 11 ; thus showing a greater 

 predominance in the vegetation, than would be suggested 

 by the low numerical position of Plantaginaceae, no. 38, 

 in the floral census. Not much below them, no. 23, 

 comes Iris Pseudacorus in the census list ; a position of 

 this species which is not at all suggested by the com- 

 paratively low places of its order in the floral census, 



