The Flora of West Yorkshire

Abstract

IT is just a quarter of a century since John Gilbert Baker's excellent book on the botany, geology, climate, and physical geography of North Yorkshire appeared,¹ and the present volume, devoted to West Yorkshire, is avowedly moulded on that model. Since then, English county and other local “floras” have become very numerous—many of them well executed, others indifferently. We do not mean to say that Mr. Baker was the originator of local “floras,” for this branch of botanical literature early took root in this country, and has perhaps attained a development unknown else where. Interesting among the earlier of such publications is John Ray's “Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium,“which dates (1660) nearly a hundred years before the first edition of Linnæus's “Species Plantarum.” It is interesting alike for its botany and its botanical history. But the importance of exactitude in recording the localities of plants was not thoroughly realized by amateur botanists until they were stimulated thereto by the methodical and conscientious, though somewhat discursive, phytogeographical writings of the late Hewett Cottrell Watson. Now, thanks to the exertions of the competent few, English amateur botanists are so thoroughly educated in geographical botany at the beginning of their studies, that the careless, or, what is worse, the unprincipled, recorder of assumed localities of the rarer plants, is at once discovered and exposed. The latitudinal and altitudinal range of each species is now known with such accuracy that any new record outside of the known limits is at once scrutinized and tested, and only accepted on the best authority. It is a question, however, whether this sort of thing is not being overdone.

The Flora of West Yorkshire, with a Sketch of the Climatology and Lithology in connection therewith.

By Frederic Arnold Lees. 8vo, pp. 843, with a Map. (London: Lovell Reeve and Co., 1888.)