XIV MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 



Imperial L.-C. Academy ' Naturae Curiosorum,' of which Nees 

 von Esenbeck was at that time the president. In the same year 

 (1885) Mr. Watson published the first volume of the 'New 

 Botanist's Guide,' and the second followed' in 1837. This is 

 planned upon the lines of the ' Botanist's Guide ' of Turner and 

 Dilwyn, and enumerates the special localities of the rare plants 

 of England and Scotland, taking them county by county. In 

 1843 he issued the first part of a much more elaborate work on 

 the pkn of the outlines. This was only carried out through the 

 series of plants, following the Candollean sequence of orders, as 

 far down as Papaveracea ; when, the plan being found to be too 

 cumbrous, the work was not carried on. The first volume of his 

 magnum opios, ' Oybele Britannica,' appeared in 1847, and it was 

 followed by volume ii. in 1849, volume iii. in 1852, and volume 

 iv. in 1859. It was his own original idea to apply the term 

 Cybele to a systematic treatise on the geography of the plants of 

 any particular country, applying it as a parallel to the term 

 Flora, which has been used for a long time for a systeniatie 

 description of the orders, genera, and species of any given tract. 

 It is in the ' Cybele ' that we have his plans for registering the 

 details of plant-distribution brought out and used in their full 

 development. These of course are so familiar to most of those 

 who will read this notice that it seems almost a work of super- 

 erogation to explain them. To each individual species he applies, 

 as it were, four different measuring scales, each adapted to 

 register its distribution from a diflereiit point of view. To record 

 its range of station he uses a series of adjectival terms, such as 

 agrestal, paludal, glareal, sylvestral, &c. To register the hori- 

 zontal distribution of the species he divides Britain into eighteen 

 provinces, founded as far as possible on river-drainage. York- 

 shire is the only county that claims a province to itself. The 

 Peninsula province includes the three counties of Cornwall 

 Devonshire, and Somerset, and so on through the series. He 

 traces the distribution of the species through these eighteen 

 provinces by giving under each name a line of figures showing 



