38
THE LIBRARY TABLE.
"A Flora of Hertfordshire."—By the late Alfred Reginald Pryor, B.A.,
F.L.S. Edited for the Hertfordshire Natural History Society by B. D. Jackson,
Sec. L.S. ; with an introduction on the Geology, Climate, Botanical History,
&c, of the County, by John Hopkinson, F.L.S., F.G.S., and the Editor. Lon-
don : 1887. 8vo, pp. viii., 588.
We congratulate our neighbours, the Hertfordshire Natural History Society,
on this further substantial evidence of the thoroughness with which they are carry-
ing out the investigation of the natural history of their county. It seems for some
years to have been a well recognised principle that each successive county Flora
that appears should be in some respects an advance upon those that had gone
before. The "Flora Hertfordiensis," by the Revs. R. H. Webb and W. H.
Coleman, published in 1849, though only a thin octavo of 436 pages, was the first
work of the kind in which the county was divided into natural divisions according
to the various river-basins. It gives a sketch of the geology of the county, records
the higher Cryptogamia, and quotes from the chief of the older writers both before
and after the time of Ray. It contains some notes on the noteworthy trees of the
county, appendices dealing with some new or critical species, and—what might
well have been spared in a local scientific work—explanations of the scientific
names and various interspersed poems.
Prof. Babington in his "Flora of Cambridgeshire" (1860) and his friend G. S.
Gibson in the "Flora of Essex" (1862) unfortunately did not adopt the river-
basins as divisions; but it was largely the influence of these two botanists that
directed attention to the records in our earlier writers. In many respects the
"Flora of Middlesex" of Messrs. Trimen and Dyer (1869) marked another epoch
in this history of progress. The system of river-basins was adopted; the book
contained a full introduction dealing with the local geology and meteorology ; and
never had the older writers been so thoroughly searched nor so interesting a history
of the progress of botany in a county been compiled.
Without stopping to mention other advances in detail that have since been made,
we may pass at once to the new "Flora of Hertfordshire," based upon the MSS.
of the late Mr. Pryor, which has just appeared under the editorship of Mr. Daydon
Jackson, the learned botanical secretary of the Linnean Society. The work, run-
ning as it does to 646 pages, is half as large again as its predecessor : it follows
the river-basin system of division, so that the districts are approximately the same
as those in the earlier work : illustrated by no less than three maps, it contains
a most complete introduction on the Geology, Stratigraphical and Hydrological,
and of the climate, the accuracy of which is vouched for by the authorship of
Mr. John Hopkinson. The essay on the Botanical History of the county by the
Editor, if less interesting than that in the Middlesex Flora, is so mainly
from coming after it and from not dealing with a metropolitan or a large area. It
corrects the error, pointed out by Hewett Watson, which Webb and Coleman's
work shared with Gibson's "Flora of Essex," of citing correspondents under
initials only ; it gives full lists of both vascular and cellular cryptogams, and a table
extending to 32 pages of the distribution of the species throughout the districts
of Hertfordshire and the adjacent counties. A table of phenological observations
for the county extending over eleven years, giving the earliest, latest and mean
dates of flowering of eighty common species, is very interesting ; such records
might well be more extensively given for other counties in the future. It is,