A New British Flora
THE need of a completely new flora of the British Isles has for long humiliated botanists, who have had to resort to Continental hand- books. For many years we have told both students and foreign visitors that we use revisions of old books which are quite out of date, and we have witnessed the failure of at least one ambitious project, the Cambridge British Flora, which foundered in 1920 at the end of its second volume. The publication of Butcher and Strudwick's Further Illustrations of British Plants, as a supplementary volume to Bentham and Hooker, was a landmark in 1930 which is not forgotten, especially by the keener amateurs who were so grateful for it.
Since then a scheme to produce a new flora by recruiting a large team of specialists fell through at the outset of the War, and could never have succeeded without extraordinary patience and tact on the part of its promoters. There was still no manual which incor- porated all the many new discoveries and rapidly spreading introduc- tions of the last half-century, brought the names and ranks of our plants up to date in accordance with rules or researches, and reflected the interacting influences on systematic botany of the modern sciences of ecology, cytology and genetics. It has been left to three friends, professors and lecturers at our universities, of roughly the same age and background, to get together and write the book which we all wanted.
Very modestly they remark in their introduction that it is intended primarily for students and amateur botanists, but, in fact, it is a, comprehensive dora which includes almost every recorded native or naturalised flowering plant, however critical ; only for our two largest groups, the brambles and hawkweeds, are there special simpli- fied treatments. It is a sizable volume of well over 1,600 pages, and can hardly be Taken in th'e field, except by motorists ,• the paper may not stand up to the April showers or to nervous fingers wrestling with willows and violets. The plan of the flora is on familiar lines, except that it begins with the ferns and works up to the composites, which are followed by the monocotyledons. The metric system is adopted throughout, and measurements are freely used in the descriptions and keys, which have been prepared with evident care and avoid the vague comparisons of former books. Other welcome features are the italics used in the desciiptions for contrasting characters, notes on pollination and dispersal, and the indication of the " life-form " category and the chromosome number, where known, of each species. The distributions, both in and outside Britain, seem to have been very well worked out, and add greatly to the pledsure of dipping into the book, as do the many interesting remarks on uses, habitats or related garden-plants.
Many things here would have astonished botanists of thirty years ago. Who would have suspected, for instance, that nineteen different kinds of service tree grow on our rocks, or that goosefoots would be distinguished by the patterns of the seed-coats ? Their subtle characteristics Are welkillustrated by drawings, and further diagrams; not always so clear or successful, are given for some of the other difficult groups. Our flora is continually changing, and it is good to see the inclusion of a host of trees and shrubs which are found escaping from gardens ; but the selection of those ephemeral casuals which are seen on docks and chicken-runs seems to have had no guiding principle and to have been left to the whim of the individual contributor.
The authors have rightly not shrunk from changing familiar Latin names, when international rules of nomenclature compelled them to do so, and they have largely delivered us from the bad, indefinable variety,.the quest for which has for so long been the curse of British botanists, who may now be persuaded to take up the study of varia- tion on modern lines. On the other hand, they make constant use of the rank of sub-species, an elusive concept which, as understood in this book, covers three kinds of plant (geographical, cytological and ecological sub-species) which many people would consider of very unequal status, although a " trinity in unity " is often possible. In the sedges and grasses there has been some curious splitting of familiar genera into smaller units, which,does not seem either helpful or progressive ; we may be thankful, however, that this contributor forbore to disturb the genus Carex, which is loved for its size, like London.
The professors, as befits those who teach the young, are only human, and there may be slips or unsatisfactory decisions here and there which will be the target of stern critics in botanical journals. The test of such a work will always be the general reliability of its myriad details ; only by their constant accuracy and judicious selec- tion can it enter the highest class. This book will certainly. stimulate those endless discussions in prin.; and conversation which are the vcry stuff of life for botanists throughout the hierarchy. And as one whO has spent all his own in that world, both as amateur and professional, and has watched the control of field-botany pass from country vicars and retired chemists (and how good they were in their day) to uni- versity schools and national herbaria, I have no doubt at all that it is a very notable, indeed a triumphant, achievement of which our
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