428 MR. G@. C. DRUCE ON 
doing so there will be a great advantage in preventiug that 
troublesome confusion in synonymy which has arisen from the 
name P. laxa being used to designate three different British plants. 
The description given by Syme leaves little to add, but I may 
say that the uppermost stem-leaf is usually placed well below the 
middle of the stem, and that, as varietal characters, I see that 
the lines of silvery hairs on the keel of the lower pales and on 
the lateral submarginal nerves are somewhat shorter, while the 
apex is not so acute in the Continental as in our British speci- 
mens, and to me the facies of the spikelet itself is somewhat 
different. 
The history is as follows:—In the second edition of the 
‘Manual of British Botany,’ p. 389 (1847), Babington describes 
“ Poa minor, Gaudin, from Lochnagar, Prof. Balfour.” He gives 
a queried reference to “ P. flecuosa, Sm. 1128,” and a locality 
“ Ben Nevis, Sm.”; but these references are incorrect. We find 
from his herbarium that Balfour’s specimens queried by him 
as P.laxa have been altered to P. minor by Prof. Babington. 
Two of these are plants collected by Balfour in 1846, and two 
gathered by James Backhouse in 1850. Another specimen, I 
think of Balfour’s gathering, is different, being only P. alpina. 
On another sheet there is a specimen from the same locality, 
labelled ‘“ P. flecuosa, Sm.?, J. Backhouse, Jun.,” and two, 
gathered by J. T. Syme in 1851, labelled P. minor by Babington, 
but I think they are only shade-grown P. alpina. Another sheet 
contains four specimens of Prof. Balfour’s gathering, two of 
which are Poa minor, but the other two are P. alpina, var. acutt- 
folia. Iu the third edition of the ‘Manual’ there is no change 
in the description of P. minor, except that Ben Nevis is now 
given as a locality without inverted commas, and Smith as the 
authority for its occurrence is omitted. 
In the third edition of ‘English Botany,’ vol. xi. P- 116, 
t. 1764, Syme treats this plant as a queried sub-species of Poa 
lava, calling it P. eu-laxa, thus for the first time putting it in its 
true position. He gives an excellent description. 
In the first edition of the ‘Student’s Flora’ Sir J. Hooker 
puts it as a variety minor of P. laxa, but, as we have seen, 
Incorrectly. 
In the seventh edition of the ‘ Manual,’ p. 423 (1874); Babing- 
ton repeats the description given in the third edition, making 4 
few verbal alterations, omitting the query after the reference to 
