24 
BOTANICAL EXCHANGE CLUB REPORTS. 
The Botanical Exchange Club of the British Isles. Report for 1892. 
James Collins & Co., Manchester. 
The Ninth Annual Report of the Watson Botanical Exchange Club, 
1892-3. William Sessions, York. 
Tue last reports, recently published, of our two British Botanical 
Exchange Clubs are scarcely equal in interest to some of their 
predecessors. This is inevitable, unless the passion for differentiation 
is developed to the numeration of sete on the peduncles of a rose, 
or the measuring of the tomentum on a bramble leaf, the area for 
new discovery, or even of varietal extension becomes, of course, each 
year increasingly smaller. And there are wholesome signs that even 
this tendency to discover fixed forms in merely casual deviations 
from type does not meet with favour from some of the best of our 
botanical experts. The remarks which Dr. Buchanan White makes 
upon specimens of Salix repens might be applied with equal force to 
a good deal of what is sent out from time to time in the Fascicudi of 
both clubs. He says (Exchange Club Report, p. 385) :— 
‘In putting my pen through the varietal names of some repens 
forms, I do not wish to be taken as meaning that these var. names 
have not been correctly applied—so far as they are worth anything— 
by the sender of the specimens. All I mean is that in such 
polymorphic species the perpetuation of names for varieties is worse 
than useless—it is a hindrance to study. British Willows would 
have been much better understood long ago if they had not been 
overloaded with varietal names, in many cases founded on single 
individual bushes.’ 
It is true that Mr. Linton, than whom there are few more patient 
and diligent botanists, in the same paragraph takes a different view, 
but his citation of the recent study of Hieracia does not make one 
the more sanguine of what seems to him ‘success.’ 
The number of plants recorded in both reports is somewhat less 
than in former years, but the older club, as usual, has outstripped 
considerably its younger ally, and in Mr. G. Claridge Druce it has 
the advantage of a gentleman who has added to the duties of 
a distributor the acumen and research of an experienced student. 
A large part of his report is made up not only of his own records, but 
his own remarks. 
Mr. Reader, the distributor of the Watson Club, has confined 
himself to the much briefer notes of his referees. 
Of course the doctors have differed; for example, Agropyron 
pungens R.&S. var. “ittorale (Reichb.), is passed by Mr. Druce. 
Naturalist, 
