482 Ill. SEGREGATES AND 
they have been uncalled for, and simply mischievous ; but more 
usually warranted, and made circumspectly. They seem to have 
been suggested by looking into foreign books or upon the labels of 
foreign specimens, rather than by looking at English plants. 
Examples of this fault will shortly be given, with its confusing 
consequences to our own botanical nomenclature; here given, not 
for the purpose of finding fault with the fault, but in order to 
shew the confusion brought into our names of plants through the 
characteristic mentioned. Of course, where the object is to shew 
the uncertainty of our locality records, arising from transfers of 
names and other changes in them, it is unavoidably to the defects 
of our descriptive Floras in this wise, rather than to their com- 
pensating excellencies otherwise, that attention must here be 
drawn. 
In its first edition the ‘Manual’ differed from the ‘ English 
Flora,’ as to the plants now under consideration, only by again 
describing the circinatus and fluitans as two species instead of 
two varieties. This course might be called giving judgment in 
favour of Ray, Sibthorp, Gray, and others, as against Linneus, 
Hudson, Smith, etc. Few botanists of the present time will be 
disposed to reverse that judgment ; and the Author may well be 
forgiven for not so clearly recognizing the differences between the 
two first of the four species above quoted from Ray’s book. 
Indeed, the Author of the ‘ Manual’ seems to have less of that 
discriminative tact for recognizing tenable species, apart from 
casual variations, which is more a characteristic of Mr. Boswell- 
Syme’s writings; and it is so pretty much because this latter 
botanical writer studies the real plants themselves in nature, more 
than at second-hand as described in the books of Fries or Koch. 
In the second edition of the ‘Manual’ the pantothriv, which 
had been placed under aquatilis in the former edition, is now lost 
sight of in the Author's growing tendency to believe in anything 
Friesian, sound or unsound. After there describing R. aquatilis 
aremark was added which merits some critical notice, because it 
involves a fallacy frequent and detrimental among botanists, and 
not unknown among zoologists ; although it is not usually made so 
