178 MR. MILLER CHRISTY ON 
Continental (but not all British) writers. Probably the earliest 
post-Linnean figure of the plant is that in Oeder's ‘Flora 
Danica.’ * 
Primula elatior, Jacq., has a very wide, though somewhat 
capricious, distribution upon the Continent. It occurs in the 
Pyrenees, and extends thence westward over most of Central 
and Northern Europe to the confines of Siberia. In the Medi- 
terranean region, it is generally absent. It flourishes chiefly in 
wet alpine meadows and in woods. 
The history of our knowledge of the plant in Britain is some- 
what peculiar. There can be very little doubt that it was (in 
part, at least) the “Great Cowslips or Oxlips " (Primula veris 
elatior pallido flore) of Ray (1660)f. Ray could hardly be 
otherwise than familiar with the plant, owing to his long resi- 
dence at Cambridge (near which place it grows) and to the fact 
that every time he journeyed from that place to his birthplace 
and home at Black Notley, in Essex, he must have passed through 
the very heart of the region occupied by the plant in Britain. 
Whether, however, he distinguished it from the Common (Hybrid) 
Oxlip is open to question. In the eighth volume of the first 
edition of ‘ English Botany,’ published in 1799 (p. 513), the true 
Primula elatior of Jacquin (1778) was figured—not, it is true, 
with absolute accuracy, but still quite unmistakably¢. This is all 
the more remarkable because, at that time and for balf a century 
later, the Common (Hybrid) Oxlip was, in Britain, generally 
confused with, and regarded as, Jacquin’s plant; indeed, from 
what the author of ‘ English Botany’ says, it is clear that he 
himself did not distinguish between the two. That he figured 
the true species, and not the better-known hybrid form generally 
mistaken for it, was, therefore, certainly due to a fortunate 
* * Flora Danica,’ vol. iii, (1770), pl. 334. The descriptions of Plates 333 
and 334 (the Cowslip and the Oxlip respectively) appear to have been trans- 
posed through a printer's error, 
T ‘Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium, p. 71. . 
i This figure (which has appeared in all later editions of the work, 1 
cluding that now eurrent) was drawn from a plant supplied by “ the Rev. 4T 
Hemsted,” but where that gentleman resided I know not. Dr. Blomfiel 
believed (see ‘ Phytologist,’ vol. iii. p. 695) that he lived somewhere in Essex 
The figure errs in representing the stalk too thick, the calyx of an incor 
shape and of a wrong length in proportion to the pedicel, while the arrangement 
of the flowers in the umbel is not altogether true to nature. 
