Watsonian Vice-Counties of Great Britain (two Map set) [Jan Gillett's copy] by Dandy, J.E - 1969

London: The Ray Society, 1969. Two large folding maps, with 38 page booklet, good condition in a slightly worn and faded slipcase. From the library of the Kew botanist Jan Gillett, with his signature on the covers. [A vice-county is a geographical division of the British Isles used for the purposes of biological recording and other scientific data-gathering. It is sometimes called a Watsonian vice-county as vice-counties were introduced for Great Britain, its offshore islands, and the Isle of Man, by Hewett Cottrell Watson who first used them in the third volume of his Cybele Britannica published in 1852. Watson's vice-counties were based on the ancient counties of Britain, but often subdividing these boundaries to create smaller, more uniform units, and considering exclaves to be part of the vice-county in which they locally lie. A vice-county provides a stable basis for recording using similarly-sized units, and, although grid-based reporting has grown in popularity, vice-counties remain a standard in the vast majority of ecological surveys, allowing data collected over long periods of time to be compared easily. The vice-counties remain unchanged by subsequent local government reorganisations, allowing historical and modern data to be more accurately compared.]. Paperback in slipcase. Good.