23 G 
THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
O’ 
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importance of the plan which was inaugurated last year.of 
thoroughly examining and recording the flora of a comparatively 
limited locality. In this way not rarities only are noted, hut, what is 
more liable to be overlooked or neglected, the presence or absence of 
the commoner plants is forced upon the attention of the enquirer. 
Such records will not only serve as guides to local students and as 
authentic testimonies to which reference can be made in the future, 
but, as it is only in this way that the larger districts can be thoroughly 
and systematically worked out, they will provide a body of facts 
which will help to throw light upon many dark questions concernin 
the distribution of species, questions which are at present but little 
understood, and to the solution of which naturalists are as yet but 
slowly groping their way.” During his long residence in Perth the 
banks of the Tay as far as “ Woody Island ” was one of his favourite 
walks, and there, as elsewhere, his eye was ever open for those 
changes in plant-life which are constantly taking place. 
But undoubtedly it is by his contributions to our knowledge 
of British roses that Barclay is best known to a wide circle of 
botanical friends and correspondents. Until he systematically took 
up its study, very little was known about this critical genus and its 
distribution in Scotland. The hybrid forms interested him espe¬ 
cially, and in Ann. Soc. Nat. Hist, are numerous notes on the occur¬ 
rence of Rosa involuta Sm., R. hibernica Sin., and other pimpinelli- 
folia hybrids in different parts of Scotland. Boses also formed the 
subject of most of the notes that occasionally appeared from his pen 
in the pages of this Journal. The rare hybrid pimpinelUfalia x 
rubiginosa which he first discovered in Scotland at Caputh in 1897 
was found in greater abundance on the Haddington coast and recorded 
in Journ. Bot. 1910, 2G0. In the same volume he described (p. 332) 
from the same locality a distinct variety of R. hibernica without 
appending a varietal name. 
It is of interest to recall that it was through the introduction of 
the late Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour that Barclay entered into corre¬ 
spondence in 1891 with Professor Crepin, of Brussels, one of the 
leading continental rhodologists at that time. The exchange of 
specimens which followed, together with the observations Crepin was 
able to offer from a wider field of experience, enabled Barclay to deal 
systematically with his Scottish material, and he published the first 
of his results in this connexion in Ann. Scot. Nat. Hist. 189G, under 
the title “Notes on Scottish Boses.” One form of the R. corii- 
folia aggregate perplexed him, as it also did Crepin, and only after 
long and patient study did he publish an account of it under the name 
of R. subcoriifolia. The description is given in “Further Notes on 
Scottish Boses” (op. cit. 1899). This, so far as the writer is aware, 
is the only name of which Barclay is the author, and among those 
who were especially interested in the genus the plant provoked a 
certain amount of discussion in which the author held his ground 
with characteristic tenacity, maintaining to the end that his species 
was distinct from any of the earlier described forms to which some 
sought to refer it. Had it been his inclination to create names, he 
could have done so, as he often told me, with great ease, for the 
