116 TRANSACTIONS, NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF GLASGOW. 



In Scotland, Crithmum is both rare and local. It comes near 

 the truth to say that it has of late been much restricted to a 

 part of the Wigtownshire coast — the Rinns of Wigtown, that 

 long, narrow peninsula which stretches south and ends in the 

 headland known as the Mull of Galloway.* By Professor Trail, 

 in his Topographical Botany of Scotland, two East - Coast 

 counties are given for Crithmum — Midlothian and Fife — but 

 they are double-queried in both cases, indicating decided doubts 

 as to the correctness of any East-Coast records. Coming west, 

 the counties named both by Hewitt Cottrell Watson and by 

 Professor Trail are Kirkcudbright, Wigtown, and Ayr. From 

 Watson's Topographical Botany of Great Britain (1883) we 

 know that a Kirkcudbright specimen was shown to Watson by 

 Boswell Syme, editor of Sowerby's Botany, 3rd edition, and 

 as regards Ayrshire, that Crithmum is included by the late 

 Rev. James Duncan (died 1861), whose Catalogue of Ayrshire 

 plants was treated by Watson as reliable, no Ayrshire station, 

 however, being given for Crithmum. Mr. Ewing, in his Glasgow 

 Catalogue of Plants, includes Crithmum for Ayrshire, but does 

 not say where or by whom it was found. 



That our plant should have made its way so far north as to 

 Colonsay, where, on the western side of the island, it was last 

 year met with, growing in a compact mass two square yards in 

 extent, just at high-water mark, and among very savage, large, 

 broken rocks, was interesting, as it extends the plant's geo- 

 graphical range a good way further up the British coast, indi- 

 cating that there is room for the discovery of other plants with 

 which the higher latitude would not disagree. 



There is but one species of the genus Crithmum known to 

 science, this of ours, and its distribution, according to Bentham, 

 is the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Northern Africa, extending 

 along the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. 



It is abundant in Southern and Western England, and, as Mr. 

 F. H. Davey states in his new Tentative Flora of Cornwall, it 

 occurs all round the Cornish coast. It is to be found also in 

 Ireland, principally in the south, and the author of this paper 

 met with it in 1901 on the Kenmare River, on the coast of 

 County Kerry. 



* It has been found, however, at Burrow Head, across Luce Bay from 

 tho Rhinns, by Messrs. Paterson, Mackenzie, and Robertson, Glasgow, 

 about ten years ago. 



