PRESERVATION OF PLANTS 
191 
of such extermination, or, if not extermination, of the thinning 
of tlie numbers of certain species of plants, and at any rate of 
their local extermination, lies at the door of an increased popu- 
lation. Every other cause which may be assigned as part 
reason of the extermination of certain species of our native flora, 
is simply itself the result of necessities forced upon the com- 
munity by reason of the numbers of such community. An 
increased population must be housed, and so estates are cut up. 
Lands are drained, lakes and ponds of great age are filled up, 
rivers are embanked, and landscape gardening takes the place of 
wild woodland. All these follow in the wake of the require- 
ments of a rapidly-increasing population. And one cause of the 
disappearance locally of many wild flowers, which has not yet, 
so far as I am aware, been recognised, but which does not now 
act to the same extent as formerly, is the policy which up to 
thirty or forty years ago encouraged landowners, and owners of 
common rights over waste lands of manors, to make wholesale 
enclosures of such lands, with the intention, of course, that the 
land enclosed should be put under cultivation, and so assist in 
augmenting the corn supply of the nation, at a time when the 
importation of corn was highly taxed. We know now that 
much of the enclosed land was never put under crops, and that 
private greed had much to do with many important enclosures ; 
but, at the same time, even if we estimate that three-fourths of 
legally-enclosed land only was put under crops, we have some 
3^ millions of acres of more or less virgin land ploughed up 
between 1709 and 1809, during which period, on the authority of 
Sir Robert Hunter, no less than 4,770,890 acres of common 
lands were enclosed under Acts of Parliament. It will be 
admitted, I think, that this policy must have resulted in the 
disappearance locally of many a representative of Britain’s 
native flora, if not in some cases complete extermination; but 
the latter it would be difficult to actually prove at the present 
time. 
The subject now under consideration is necessarily treated 
from a different point of view, according as we take a purely 
botanical and scientific standpoint, or regard it from the point of 
view of those who are not botanists, yet who lament the dis- 
appearance, from old and accustomed haunts, of plants which 
are not rare when the whole country is concerned, but which 
have yet come to be rare locally. So far as the rarer plants are 
concerned, the disappearance of such is regretted only by the 
purely scientific, and it must be admitted that their own pre- 
decessors are the very people who have been mainly instru- 
mental, by their own selfishness, in bringing about the 
extermination which all botanists now, almost without exception, 
so greatly lament. Nowadays, when a botanist has made a 
discovery, does he tell you exactly where he happened upon it ? 
Not a bit of it. He cannot even trust his own species, and in 
this he acts w’isely, and the plant he has discovered has a chance 
