BOTANY 
T must be confessed that although a considerable proportion of the 
species of plants which actually occur have been put on record, yet 
their distribution through the various parishes of the county is at 
present inadequately known, and the knowledge of such critical 
genera as the brambles, roses and eyebrights, the segregation of which 
has during the last years of the nineteenth century been made the object 
of special study, is most imperfect. The publication of this sketch of 
the flora of the county, incomplete as it avowedly is, will, it is to be 
trusted, stimulate local workers to fill up the lacunz, and to prepare a 
complete flora such as exists for so many other counties. 
It is true a very excellent work on the subject, the Flora Bedfordiensis 
by the Rev. Charles Abbot, D.D., of Oakley Raynes, was published in 
1798, but necessarily a work issued at that date is insufficient in detail, and 
has an archaic nomenclature. Moreover shortly after its publication the 
Enclosure Act led to a considerable change in the vegetation of the 
county from the introduction of hedges as separating boundaries to the 
fields, and from the enclosure of commons, some of which had at one 
time a heathy growth, but which soon under the influence of cultivation 
lost much of their original flora, and either as pasture or arable land 
became like their neighbours in possessing few plants of interest ; indeed 
so rare has the true heath (Erica cinerea) become that it now exists, it 
is said, in only one locality in the county. The higher cultivation of 
arable land and the more complete system of drainage have likewise 
been factors in gradually eliminating some of the original species from 
their homes and replacing them by less interesting and more widely dis- 
tributed plants. Nor is the process arrested ; each decade threatens some 
local species, and witnesses the encroachment of common plants. Need 
we wonder then that several plants mentioned by Abbot have either 
become extinct, or are now so scarce as to have evaded the observation 
of recent botanists. 
The area of the county is small, indeed only Hunts, Middlesex and 
Rutland are smaller in England. Compared with other counties its flora 
is small also ; there are several reasons, apart from the mere extent of 
surface, why this should be so, the chief of these perhaps being the 
excellent condition of tillage and cultivation of the surface soil, which 
necessarily means that the aboriginal features of the flora have long ago 
disappeared ; while, although so much of the surface is below two hun- 
dred feet in altitude, yet the drainage is so complete that few marshes, 
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