FIFTY YEARS OF BOTANY IN BRISTOL. 
27 
The industry of observers in tracing the distribution of plants, 
not only in the Bristol district but in all parts of the British Isles, 
since the appearance of our earliest catalogues and local lists, has 
been remarkable and shows no sign of slackening. A like energy 
during the same period has been expended in the critical study of 
plant-forms or variations, both in the field and in herbaria. This 
study, which becomes more and more minute as the years go by, 
has led to the description and definition by name of a vast number 
of variations. The old limitations of species and lower grades 
into which plants had been divided have, in fact, practically disap- 
peared and are no longer recognizable. As a result genera that 
contain plastic or polymorphic groups with numerous slightly 
differentiated forms, like Cratcegus and Aster in America, and 
Rub us or Hieracium in the Old World, have been rendered hope- 
lessly unworkable to any but the most devoted expert through the 
adoption and promulgation of "species" and " varieties " based 
on characters which at one time would have been deemed trivial in 
the extreme. Thus, botanists are entering on an epoch of 
specialism, and have already at command a series of Monographs 
representing the strenuous enthusiastic work of expert students 
on all the material available in each of these perplexing genera or 
families. These developments affect us locally through the 
necessity that arises from time to time for obtaining expert opinion 
on Bristol specimens of doubtful affinities, and through the 
intelligent help repeatedly given by skilled non-resident observers 
in drawing our attention to difficult local forms of the groups above 
mentioned. The late Rev. Augustin Ley, a most accomplished 
botanist, was indefatigable in his efforts to disentangle the Cheddar 
Hieracia. Without his aid we should not have understood our 
Pyrus variations, and his incursions were at all times profitable 
to his friends in Bristol. 
The flowering plants actually discovered in Britain during the 
past half-century may not number more than twenty, but the 
multiplication of named forms split off from previously known 
aggregates has lengthened the London Catalogue of British Plants 
from a total of, say, 1,800 species and varieties to something like 
2,Soo in the last edition ; and correspondingly has swollen the 
grand total of the Bristol phanerogams to over 1,600. 
Looking back over so many years the more distant events do 
not stand out so clearly as one would wish. From a botanical out- 
look, however, it seems fairlv plain that the Bristol Naturalists' 
Society was founded at a time of profound stagnation. Swete's 
Flora Bristoliensis had been published about eight years, and it 
might be thought that such a book would have given a marked 
stimulus to local investigation. But the author's professional 
calling led him elsewhere. He left the city almost at once, and 
his band of helpers speedily melted away. We find no note of 
supplemental work on the flora in the decade that followed. Herr 
Adolph Leipner, the first secretary and the soul of our Society for 
