Abstract
IT is now some years ago since Mr. Van Voorst published for Messrs. Smith and Beck two volumes of a “Synopsis of British Diatomaceæ,” by Prof. William Smith, of Cork, which were beautifully illustrated by Mr. Tuffen West. The latter volume of this Synopsis was published in 1856, and even then the number of new forms of these minute silicious Algæ had rendered necessary the preparation of a supplement which, however, owing to the death of the author, never appeared. Since 1856 many and important works and memoirs on the diatoms have been published, and not only have the pages of the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science contained numerous writings on this subject, but workers like Rabenhorst, Grunow, and Cleeve have continued to add to not only the number of species, but to the amount of our knowledge of the Diatomaceæ. We venture, nevertheless, to think that the time had not quite come to write anew a history of the British Diatomaceæ. The difficulty of finding good specific characters remains just as great as it was when Smith's work was published, and the number of local lists recorded has been too few to give us anything like an idea of the geographical distribution of these forms; still we should be sorry not to welcome one of Mr. Van Voorst's series of British Natural History works, a series of which we have every reason to be proud; almost their only drawback being incidental to the method in which the works of the series are published, viz. in numbers, by which it too often happens that there is a want of uniformity between the earlier and later portions of the work.
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British Diatomaceæ * . Nature 3, 210 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/003210a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/003210a0