NUMERICAL REPRESENTATION OF PLANT DISTRIBUTION 4138 
position of the counties of the whole United Kingdom when we 
were children, and now intuitively the name instantly recalls its 
position on the maps, an end that I cannot see is at all assisted by 
the numbers. In the — =“ of Primula elatior, the numbers 
i , 830”’ convey n a of locality to my mind, while I 
grasp a at o once the meaning of ‘‘ Essex u = W., Cam- 
bridge, Bedford,’’ which are the localities for this p 
atson’s Topographical Botany there ~ 1438 of these 
oohnnkise of explanation, shorter or longer according to the extent 
of the distribution of each plant; in Mr. Prae eger’s Irish Topo- 
graphical Botany there are 400 pages of similar columns. Every 
time I open Watson I am more and more impressed with the 
difficulty his numbers create; nor shall I ever forget my bewilder- 
ment on the first occasion of opening his work, and being introduced 
to what he calls his ‘ provinces,’ ‘‘ subprovinces,’’ and “ vice- 
counties.’ I asked myself ‘“ Are there no counties ?”” The county 
m hout the prefixed number answers every purpose that a 
botanist can require, but Watson was not c t with revolu- 
tionizing the appellations by which the counties are know 
abolished the use of the word « county’ for which he rakitinnted 
-z “ vice- eae having much the same meaning as the older word 
and Mr. Pr aeger in his work abolishes “ county ’’ for 
rg slightly larger word “division.” And all the while in both 
books the unty boundaries as the public knows them are strictly 
adhered ee 
In the communications on the Irish portion of this subject that 
have appeared in this “sag ae in the Irish Naturalist, the only 
reason given for the of the numbers peste itself into this, 
“H.C. Watson did it ker eaters Britain, and it is done for Ireland.”’ 
This reasoning is like many another ncnataa’ “that has been tried 
on Ireland. If somebody had the courage to put his pen through 
every one of those iterated columns of numbers in Watson and 
raeger, he would be a benefactor to every student who is interested 
in the hie of these islands. 
I enter a plea for the retention of the county names 
seitbill etic had a practical trial of Watson’s numbers. I 
little handbook of the British Hepatics that I printed a few years 
ago, | took the distribution of the Hepatics in Great Britain from 
Mr. W. H. Pearson’s magnificen nt work, and inserted the numbers 
without the county names, as he had done; and I regret having 
tes ne so. I constantly use my own book, an have always to 
n up the explanation of the numbers when I want to see in what 
caus a certain plant has been found. 
he samples of beautiful and ingenious maps recently presented 
to the public by Mr. a which i the maps in Watson’s 
Geography of British Plants, convince me that it is too late to 
— out the British Islands into Suciangias, each designated by a 
mb: 
i reason has been a —— against the use of the 
existing county names. One r did allude to the contractions 
of the names of the Irish ae "that have been already used by 
