The Orchids of County Dublin, 195 



on the railway banks, near Shankill, and I have found the form frequent 

 in woods near the head of Saggard Slade. 

 Ranges from sea-level at Balbriggan to 1,000 feet on Slieve Thoul. 



Splranthes autumnalis (Rich.)— Lady's Tresses.— Apparently- 

 very rare in the county. Recorded from Bray Common, from Killiney, 

 and from Loughlinstown, but not recentl3^ Found on the North Bull 

 about the year 1885 by the late Mr. A. G. More. It would be desirable to 

 search for this plant along the top of the drift banks from Killiney to 

 the Bray river, towards the middle or end of August. 



Epipactis palustris (Crantz)— Marsh HeIvIvEborine. — This 

 species appears to have been formerly much more abundant in the 

 county than at present. Templeton, in his MS. Flora, gives the follow- 

 ing localities : — "Jamestown, \ mile beyond Kilgobbin, Co. Dub- 

 lin, Dr. Stokes, October 26, 1801. Plentiful in a bog in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Killiney Bay, and among the sand-hills at Baldoyle 

 Strand." The first of these is its earliest recorded Dublin station : in the 

 third, better known as Portmarnock sand-hills, it still holds its ground, 

 Mr. Praeger having gathered it there last year. The plant is now per- 

 haps extinct in the stations Stagstown and Kingstown^ given by Wade 

 in his PlantcB Rariores (1804). Should this be so, it would make all the 

 more acceptable the new station quite recently added in Glenasmole, 

 where a considerable number of plants was discovered by Rev. C. F. 

 d' Arcy on this year's June excursion of the Dublin Field Club. 



Lowland in the county, reaching only to 600 feet (in Glenasmole). 



Epipactis latifolla (Sw.)--Hei,i.Eborine.— Recorded in Mackay's 

 Catalogtie of the Indigenous Plants of Ireland, 1825, for Portmarnock sands, 

 an unsatisfactory habitat for a woodland species. In Mackay's Flora 

 mbernica, published eleven years later, the Portmarnock station is trans- 

 ferred to E. palustris. Though the plant is marked in the British Associa- 

 tion Guides 1878, as " rather tare " for Dublin and Wicklow, I had no 

 recent records for the county, until last month (July, 1895), when I had 

 the good fortune to discover about a dozen plants of this species in a 

 wood near Ballybetagh, north of the Scalp. 



Orchis pyramidalis (Linn.)— Pyramidal orchis.— A decidedly 

 calcicole" plant, abundant in Dublin, where it finds in almost all 



* Not, of course, the modern Kingstowm, the Dunleary of Wade's 

 generation ; but the district of Kingston, lying about a mile N. of the 

 Scalp, where the Rev. vS. A. Brenan informs me he gathered the plant in 

 i860. 



2 This convenient word is adopted from Coutejean's " Geographic 

 Botanique," Paris, 1881, as it clearly denotes the observed connection 

 between lime-soils and certain species of plants, without in any way 

 begging the very vexed question as to whether the influence of the 

 mineral is chemical or mechanical. 



A 2 



