Zbc Selbome Society’s flfcaoaainc 
No. 15. MARCH 14, 1891. Vol. II. 
NOTES ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF RARE 
PLANTS IN BRITAIN. 
'N laying the following results of holiday rambles before 
the readers of Nature Notes, I must premise that 
I they have no pretensions whatever to be brought up 
J to the level of the advanced biologists of the present 
day. Engrossed as I necessarily am in my own professional 
duties, it is impossible for me to consider the products of my 
excursions into the botanical field as more than the gleanings 
from the bye-paths of hasty recreation ; and it is as such that I 
wish these somewhat superficial remarks to be received and 
judged by my fellow Selbornians. 
I confess in the outset that I have no theory to maintain or 
even to propose. Indeed, my object is not to air a theory, but 
simply to set the botanists among your readers speculating, 
observing, reading, and comparing facts ; it is to arouse enquiry 
and stimulate the further collection of data ; and I leave to 
cleverer and niaturer students of nature than myself the formu- 
lation of a theory on the subject. 
Let me more clearly limit my field of enquiry. I am not 
going to propound such obvious truths as every field collector 
knows by experience and every book-student learns from his 
manual, viz., that different soils (geologically and lithologically 
speaking) produce a different flora ; c.g., that we might almost 
a prion predict the plants we should find on mica-schist, 
mountain limestone, oolite, chalk, sandstone ; that the mountain 
side, the moorland, the saltmarsh, the inland bog, the brook- 
side, the sandy warren, have their regularly appointed plant 
denizens ; and that if we wish to pick up exotic stragglers, 
we must scan the corn-field, the clover-field, and (best of all) 
the ballast-heap. 
The special subject I purpose to deal with is the vara avcs 
of British Botany, the plants that are restricted to one locality, 
or to a very few : these are, to vary the metaphor, the &raf 
Ac-youtva of Plant-life. Every civilized language has its 
