632 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



the case, are built on natural beauty-spots or on particularly 

 salubrious sites. 



It is perhaps un-British to condemn anything which encour- 

 ages the love of sport but nowadays vast areas are given up 

 to recreation, whereby wild plants on the outskirts of towns 

 are exposed. This applies especially to golf. A certain 

 type of ground, suitable for golf-links, by an irony of 

 circumstances is very favourable to the growth of a class of 

 rare or local plants. And links are artificially treated, so that 

 the natural turf becomes altered in the process and all but the 

 soft grass tends to disappear. The proximity of golf-links to a 

 large city at once effaces the extensive flora that tracts suited for 

 links afford ; as an example, we may mention Barnes Common, 

 once noted for many uncommon wild-flowers. Racecourses 

 again are examples of the same correspondence between rare 

 plant habitats and natural features suited to sport. The old 

 racecourse at Leicester afforded before its conversion into a 

 sporting centre a station for the Mouse-tail, a particularly rare 

 plant in this county. 



One of the most important factors of plant extermination, 

 because selective, is the practice of commercial hawking and 

 collecting. It is enough to offer, as an example of this class of 

 vandalism, the case of the Killarney Fern, which was sold in 

 Killarney as long ago as 1850 for five shillings a single root. 

 This and other cases of the kind in Ireland I have already 

 described elsewhere. And what applies to Ireland applies with 

 greater force, in regard to the extent of such ravages, in England, 

 Scotland and Wales. Moreover, ferns are not the only com- 

 modity in request but many other wild plants, especially the 

 beautiful ones, such as anemones, primroses, bluebells and 

 orchids come within the purview of the hawking fraternity. 



To some extent the modern practice of taking holiday excur- 

 sions has been the cause, in the neighbourhood of holiday-resorts, 

 of the disappearance of the wild-flowers that used to adorn such 

 beauty-spots at the commencement of the holiday-making era. 

 This cause may appear unimportant to the uninitiated but 

 statistics show otherwise. 



The districts around towns are not the only source of plunder 

 for this class of depredator, for hawkers and tourists alike invade 

 the more secluded spots where vegetation is luxuriant and take 

 toll of the rarities to be found in such haunts. 



