The Scottish Naturalist. 173 



bud, usually situated on a twig bearing a number of flowers. 

 It resembles a considerably swollen half-grown bud. Size 

 about y^ inch by }i inch. It is frequently surrounded at 

 its base by the sepals, but no other part of the flower can 

 be distinguished. Contains a large central cavity inhabited 

 by a larva which is not cecidomyious, but which I have not 

 yet reared. Banchory, 7th June, common. 



(To be continued. ) 



A New British Moss.— Dr. Moore, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Dublin, 

 who has already done so much to extend our knowledge of the bryology of the Brit- 

 ish Isles, and especially of Ireland, has again been so fortunate as to discover another 

 moss hitherto unknown as a native of the kingdom. In 1868, when he was on a 

 visit to the Island of Lewis, one of the outer Hebrides, his attention was taken 

 by a Sphagnu?n growing plentifully on the flat moors, and rising from eighteen 

 inches to two feet above the surrounding surface. In a letter to me, in which 

 specimens were enclosed, Dr. Moore states that he had regarded it as a remark- 

 able form of Sphagnum cymbiforme, but so extraordinary that he had drawn up 

 a diagnosis of its peculiarities. This summer he showed the plant to Lindberg. 

 and that distinguished botanist expressed his belief that it was identical with a 

 comparatively recent American species, viz., Sphagnum A u stint Sull. I have 

 compared specimens of the Lewis plant with original specimens of Sphagnum 

 Austmi gathered in America by Austin in 1863, and the former do not differ 

 much from the latter except in being stouter and having the branches more 

 crowded upon the stems. It is interesting to find that another American species 

 is a British species also, and that the Floras of Great Britain and America are, 

 by still another link, more closely connected than we were hitherto aware of. — 

 J. Fergusson, New. Pitsligo. 



Anacalypta latifolia.— Last July, Dr. Buchanan White, Mr. J. Allen 

 Harker, and mjself, discovered a new and. fifth British locality for this ex- 

 tremely rare and interesting little moss. We found it in fair abundance on 

 Graig Koynach, near the Castleton of Braemar. Here, as in the other stations 

 in Great Britain in which it had previously been found, it grows on the finely- 

 pulverized earth of limestone rocks, a soil excelling all others in richness. On 

 Graig Koynach, as on the Gaar Rocks and on the rock behind the farm 

 of Tomintoul on Morrone, the other Aberdeenshire localities in which 

 it is found, it loses much of that alpine character which we are naturally 

 led to attribute to it, when we remember that on the Continent it is met with 

 only near the eternal snows on the summits of the Swiss and Jurassic Alps, and 

 that in the shires of Forfar and Perth it appears only at high altitudes. It 

 strikes one as very odd, that from the spot at Tomintoul farm where Anacalypta 

 latifolia can be gathered, one can almost pitch a stone into potatoe and turnip 

 fields; and that on Craig Koynach it grows in the heart of a great wood at an 

 elevation of not more than 1400 feet, and associated with a profusion of plants 

 of a subalpine and lowland type. It is almost certain that the plant occurs 

 elsewhere in the north of Scotland, and should be looked for on the limestone 

 of the south flank of the Cairnwell in Glenshee, on the Nether Craig in Black- 

 water, and about Tomintoul in Banffshire. — Id. 



A New British Fungus.— I understand that the Rev. James Keith, M. A., 

 Forres, who is our best Scottish fungologist, has gathered near Forres what 



