LICHENS. 203 



for hiding, or to some extent losing yourself, and for 

 breaking your legs among deep fissures in the grotesque 

 rock masses, yet their treasures are brought within much 

 more easy reach of the adventurer, and you may chance 

 to find a rough board nailed across two blocks of lime- 

 stone of a sufficiently similar height to afford a safe 

 resting-place, near to a mass of weather-worn rock, 

 encrusted with the Crab's eye lichen and the Cudbear. 

 The Crab's eye lichen (Lecanora Parella, Plate XIV., jig. 

 10), forms an exception to the rule recently laid down, 

 of the disk of the apothecia being different in colour to 

 the crust. In this instance the colour is the same. This 

 lichen abounds on rocks and walls, covering the weather 

 side of gravestones with circular grey warted crust, 

 flourishing in the graveyards about Hawkkurst, and in 

 those about Edinburgh, and decorating the rocks at 

 Tunbridge Wells, granite rocks in Cornwall, those of 

 limestone in the north of Yorkshire, and the trap and 

 puddingstone of the Highlands of Scotland. 



We should select the Cudbear as the head of the familv 

 (Lecanora tartarea, Plate XIV., fig. 11) in Britain, seeing 

 that it has afforded an important article of commerce. It 

 takes its English name from that of Dr. Cuthbert Gordon, 

 who first discovered the presence of the colouring pigment 

 in it, and employed it largely as a dye. The gathering 

 of this lichen used to furnish the means of living to great 

 numbers of the poor in Wales and in the Highlands ; 

 they scraped the rocks with an iron hoop, and sold the 

 scrapings at a good price ; each rock yielded a crop once 

 in five years. A foreign species, growing in the Canaries, 

 is now preferred to our English Cudbear, so that it is 



