126 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



The Trustees of the British Museum have just issued a List of 

 British Seed-plants and Ferns, compiled by Mr. Britten and Dr. 

 Rendle in accordance with the International Rules of Botanical 

 Nomenclature adopted by the Botanical Congress at Vienna, 1905. 

 These Rules insist on the adoption of the earliest specific name of 

 a plant, no matter under what genus it was first described. This 

 has resulted in a few alterations, as British botanists have generally 

 used the specific name first employed in the genus accepted ; these 

 alterations have been made only after careful investigation of the 

 literature of the subject ; a detailed account of the more important 

 will be found in this number of the Journal. The compilers are not 

 so sanguine as to suppose that their conclusions are free from error, 

 but they can at least claim that the List is the result of an extensive 

 and careful consultation of botanical literature, for which the fine 

 library of the Department of Botany has afforded exceptional oppor- 

 tunities. The arrangement of Orders is that of Bentkam's Handbook, 

 which is followed in the Public Gallery ; for the limitation of genera 

 and species, Messrs. Groves's edition of Babington's Manual is fol- 

 lowed ; the nomenclature of the latter work is adopted except where 

 this is not in accordance with the Rules. The List has been shortened 

 by the exclusion of (1) Channel Island plants, which have no claim 

 to be considered as belonging to the British Flora ; (2) critical forms 

 of Rubns, Hieracium, Euphrasia, and Salix, for which reference 

 must be made to monographs ; (3) introduced plants which have 

 not become thoroughly established ; (4) plants formerly found in 

 Britain, but now extinct. 



The death is announced of yet one more botanist named Robert 

 Brown. This last sharer of an honoured name is the subject of a 

 notice by Mr. L. Cockayne in a New Zealand paper— the Lyttelton 

 Times— to whom we are indebted for a copy. Unfortunately, long 

 as it is, the notice is singularly deficient" in definite information. 

 Brown "came to the colony more than thirty years since " — we are 

 not told whence — and " for a number of years followed his pursuit 

 as a shoemaker, but latterly that was abandoned altogether, and his 

 time was passed with his microscope, in his beautiful garden, or away 

 in the wilds over the length and breadth of New Zealand." He de- 

 voted himself especially to mosses, on which he published numerous 

 papers, illustrated by himself, in the Transactions of the New Zealand 

 Institute for 1892 and following years, describing a large number of 

 new species. He was a self-educated man, and a great walker : 

 44 at the age of seventy and upwards he was wont to walk thirty and 

 even forty miles in one day, carrying a heavy burden ; it is only a 

 little more than a year ago, and when over eighty years of age, he 

 walked, botanizing, all the way from Kaikoura to Blenheim." 

 Brown died at his residence at St. Albans, near Christchurch, 



Dec. 13, 1906. 



Williams is tmblishin? in the Bulletin de VHe 



present political limits of the colony of the Gambia, as finally 

 settled in the Anglo-French agreement dated October 1905." The 

 collections enumerated date from 1750, in which year four plants 



