236 
Oscar Drude. 
THE INTERNATIONAL PHYTOGEOGRAPHICAL 
EXCURSION IN THE BRITISH ISLES. 
IX.— The Flora of Great Britain compared 
WITH THAT OF CENTRAL EUROPE. 
By Oscar Drude 
(Dresden). 
FTER a long botanical journey through a region which, in 
spite of its strong floristic affinity with Central Europe, is 
nevertheless full of a peculiar character of its own, the comparative 
phytogeographer is glad of the opportunity of defining his most 
important impressions. And this, not only because they are new 
to him personally, but because, however much he may have studied 
the literature beforehand, the impressions so obtained can never 
possess the same sharpness as those gained directly from nature. 
Perhaps, also, it will not be without interest to English floristic 
botanists and ecologists to learn what a German botanist has seen 
in their country so richly adorned with a flora of the most varied 
charm, and what has appeared to him different from the arrange¬ 
ment of the closely allied plant-formations which occur in Germany. 
And apart from any value which such a summary—necessarily 
condensed and aphoristic—may possess in itself, I undertake it the 
more gladly in the hope that I may in this way repay a small part 
of the common debt of gratitude which we foreign botanists owe to 
our English guides, by whom we were so kindly invited and so ably 
led. Space does not permit me to deal more fully with this debt of 
gratitude as I personally feel it, but it is a special pleasure that 
these brief remarks should appear in Tansley’s journal, and that 
they should be based on his Types of British Vegetation and on 
Claridge Druce’s List of British Plants, since these two works 
provided the literary basis for the observations and notes made in 
the course of the five weeks’ tour. Just as Tansley and other 
members of the British Vegetation Committee, to all of whom I 
should like here to express my thanks, led the whole expedition 
over hills and valleys, through swamps and moors, from coast to 
coast, finishing with the ancient beeches and yews of southern 
Hampshire, so Druce was, as it were, a living herbarium of the 
flora of Great Britain, untiringly furnishing us at all times with the 
(not always simple) definitions of species, 
