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THE NATURAL HISTORY DIVISIONS OF 
LINCOLNSHIRE. 
Rev. E. ADRIAN WOODRUFFE-PEACOCK, 
Vicar of Cadney, Brigg, General and Botanical Secretary Tea Naturalists’ Union, 
and Curator of Lincolnshire County Herbariu 
THE COUNTY. | 
LINCOLNSHIRE, the second county in England in size, according to 
the last Ordnance Survey contains 1,783,769°998 square acres or 
2,787°140 square miles of land, fresh water, salt-marsh, fore-shore, 
and tidal water. It is about 75 miles from its extreme points north 
and south, and 45 miles in its widest part from east to west, and 
lies between the parallels 52 degrees and 40 minutes and 53 degrees 
43 minutes north latitude, and 56 minutes west and 22 minutes east 
longitude from the meridian of Greenwich. A little more than half 
pumps. There is not an acre ve true fen left in the whole county. 
Even the bogs on the sand commons are most restricted, and only 
found in two or three parishes in north-west Lindsey. The drainage 
has been so thoroughly carried out that in a dry season the fen- 
farms more distant from the outfall of the rivers are badly in want of 
water for their stock, and to keep the cattle from wandering across 
the natural boundaries of the district, the fen-dykes, which are often 
quite dry. The native fauna and flora of the fens have quite gone, 
but we have the fen-dyke fauna and flora in profusion, if anyone but 
a native can understand the distinction, or appreciate the effect 
which the annual cleaning out and mowing the sides of our larger 
and smaller drains, liming and manuring have had on our flora— 
annual, biennial, or perennial—and the life which it sustains. 
NATURAL HISTORY DIVISIONS. 
The plan I have adopted for these Divisions, after many useless 
attempts to make a geological or river-basin distribution, much 
thought, and some consultation with others interested in the matter, 
is a purely arbitrary one, like that of Professor Babington’s Flora of 
Cambridgeshire, for the peculiar physical features of Lincolnshire, 
with its 500,000 acres of fenland and low hills, admit of no other. 
With a very few exceptions all the natural history records yet published 
are on the parish basis; taking the larger towns as far as possible 
as centres the parishes have been aggregated round them into 
divisions, always keeping in view two points, (1) the work already 
Oct, 1895. + 
