REPORTS. 



15 



Report of the Botanical Section. 



There are this year some interesting notes, but nothing 

 very startling to report in this department of research. 

 The indigenous vegetation of the Sarnian Islands has now 

 been so thoroughly worked up, catalogued, and recorded, 

 from the highest flowering plants to the lowest microscopical 

 algae, that one cannot expect any large increase to be made 

 to the collective lists. The work of the future should be 

 directed less towards the search for plants entirely new to 

 our area, and more towards ascertaining the exact range of 

 those already known to occur; because, as I have had occasion 

 to state on many occasions, the islands differ from each other 

 to a surprising degree. 



Before dealing with matters of purely local interest, 

 I wish to say a few words about the irreparable loss 

 which science has sustained this year by the death of 

 an illustrious Belgian botanist, whose latest work, — an 

 exhaustive enumeration of the Seaweeds of the Channel 

 Islands, was published only last year. I refer to my lamented 

 friend Dr. Henri Van Heurck, Professor of Botany, and 

 Director of the Botanical Gardens at Antwerp. Dr. Van 

 Heurck, who died on the 19th of March last, at the age 

 of seventy, was one of the most distinguished of European 

 microscopists. He had made a speciality of the Diatomacere, 

 on which he was an acknowledged authority. His great 

 work, Traite des Diatomees, embellished with over 2,000 

 figures of recent and fossil species, with full descriptions 

 and references, is a monument of critical acumen and 

 laborious study, and it justly stands as a text book of the 

 highest merit. 



But Dr. Van Heurck was also a keen algologist. He 

 devoted the last years of his life to the study of the 

 seaweeds of Jersey, and the result of his researches was 

 embodied in his Prodrome de la Flore des Algues Marines 

 des lies Anglo-Normandes. It was my privilege to assist 

 him with voluminous notes and specimens collected by myself 

 during the previous fifteen years in Guernsey and Alderney, 

 thereby rendering Dr. Van Heurck's book, as he gratefully 

 acknowledges in the preface, very much more comprehensive 

 and complete than it would otherwise have been. Altogether 

 nearly 500 seaweeds are recorded with their distribution 

 not only in the Channel Islands, but along the whole north- 

 western coast of France. In no other book will be found 

 such an instructive bird's-eye view of the exceeding richness 

 and variety of the marine flora of our shores. 



