468 NOTE ON THE FLORAS OF MR. FORBES. 



The communication of Mr. Forbes is reported at con- 

 siderable length in the volume for 1845, published in the 

 name of the British Association, in the Literary Gazette, 

 in the Athenaeum, and in the Annals and Magazine of 

 Natural History. It is believed that no wrong will be 

 committed by attributing all those reports, directly or in- 

 directly, to the pen of Mr. Forbes himself There is great 

 sameness among them. The printing of such reports in 

 the volumes published for the Association, is made condi- 

 tional upon the authors of communications themselves 

 sending the reports of their own papers. And small 

 doubt indeed can exist respecting the authorship of the 

 report in the Literary Gazette, where the communication 

 of Mr. Forbes is so highly complimented. 



Those various reports are worded in such manner, as 

 unavoidably to impress readers with an idea that Mr. 

 Forbes himself had originated the arrangement of British 

 plants into the " floras." The reports contain no intima- 

 tion which could prevent the readers of them from inferring 

 that such a mode of grouping plants was quite original, 

 and also wholly and solely a result of Mr. Forbes's own 

 individual investigations into the distribution of our native 

 plants, both in Britain and elsewhere. Accordingly, the 

 Author of the ' Vestiges,' in his after-published volume of 

 ' Explanations,' very excusably attributes it wholly to Mr. 

 Forbes, and politely compliments the " really ingenious " 

 writer, for that single portion of his communication to the 

 Association ; at the same time, discarding all Mr. Forbes's 

 more hypothetical views erected thereon, as unsound or 

 unworthy of attention. 



And yet, in truth, the alleged ' floras ' were little else than 

 a garbled reproduction of the ' types of distribution,' — 

 taken from the ten-years-old volume without acknowledge- 

 ment, — varied too probably by sheer guess- work, — and then 



