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Demography is "that branch of anthropology which treats the statistics of births, deaths and diseases etc." (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed.). The etymology suggests specific relevance to man, but the word has been widely accepted into ecological literature for other species of animal and, in the absence of any obvious alternative, may be used of plant populations. Malthus (181) saw the statistical properties of populations as common to man, animals, and plants. "Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and nourisbsent necessary to rear them. The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law." The study of plant demography has never gained significant momentum within the science of ecology; plant ecologists have concentrated on the physiology, structure, and taxonomy of vegetation, while largely ignoring the population phenomena that constitute the underlying flux. The reluctance of botanists to concern themselves with numbers is the more strange because there are fewer of the problems of search, capture, and estimation that bedevil demographic research with animals. A few zoologists have remarked that theories based on animal demography may be applicable to plants (e.g. 91), and some recent attempts have been made by textbook writers to relate plant demography to the core of demographic theory developed over fifty years by zoologists (160, 291, 339). In this review an attempt is made first to examine some of the theoretical bases for the development of plant demography. Then follows a survey of our current knowledge of the subject, virtually all of which

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