Baker, F.R.S. : Geography of British Plants. 



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followed two years later. This is planned upon the lines of the 

 old " Botanist's Guide" of Turner and Dillwyn, 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 plan of the Outlines. This was only 

 carried out through the series of natural orders, following the Candol- 

 lean sequence, as far as the Papaveraceae, when the plan being found 

 to be too cumbrous, the work was discontinued. The first volume of 

 his magnum opus''' — Gybele Britannica— appeared in 1847, and it 

 was followed by vol. ii. in 1849, vol. iii. in 1852, and vol. iv. in 1859. 

 It was his own original idea to apply the term Cyhele to a systematic 

 treatise on the geographical distribution of the plants of any particular 

 tract of country, applying it as parallel to the term Moro^ which has 

 been used for a long time for a systematic description of the orders, 

 genera, and species of any given tract. It is in the Cyhele that we 

 have his plans for registering the details of plant distribution brought 

 out and used in their full development. To each individual species 

 he applies four different measuring-scales, each adapted to measure its 

 distribution from a different 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 horizontal distribution of the 

 species he divides Britain into eighteen provinces, founded, as far as 

 possible, on river drainage, so as not to infringe upon county bound- 

 aries. Yorkshire is the only county that can claim a province to 

 itself. What he calls the " Peninsular 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 for each a line of figures indicating the 

 provinces in which that particular species has been ascertained to grow. 

 For further detail, suitable to be used in local work, these provinces 

 were afterwards subdivided into 38 sub-provinces and 112 vice- 

 counties. The vertical range of the species he registers by means of 

 two regions of climate and altitudes, each divided into three zones. 

 The Agrarian region includes all that portion of Britain in which it is 

 possible, so far as climate goes, to grow corn and potatoes. Of course 

 it includes the whole area of the island at sea level from north to 

 south ; it includes also the hills up to 600 yards of elevation in the 

 north of England, and up to 400 yards in the Scotch Highlands. All 

 above this is mountain, rock and heather, with a temperature like that 

 of the low levels in Arctic latitudes. Then he deals with each species 

 from a historical point of view, classifiying them into natives, colonists. 



