SHORT NOTES 253 



do not percoptibl y shrink in size. I was told tliat one or two 

 ])otanists barely succeeded in finding Hutchinsia at Clifton three or 

 four seasons ago, when directed to one of its stations at a time when 

 many thousands of the minute plants were visible ; but these require 

 careful searching for in the right liabitat. The little wiry plants 

 have a distinct- protective colouring, and are usvially most abundant 

 and finest on the edges of certain limestone screes, partly protected by 

 low thicket. It needs far less moisture or humus than the milk- 

 white, more leafy H. olpina, a lover of loose shingle in the Al})s ; 

 and the bare or even moss-covered rock is not the best place to look 

 ior petrcea. Hudson recorded the plant from Uphill, Somerset, and 

 Collins from Cheddar. Repeated search by modern botanists in those 

 and various other likely spots has not yet disclosed this small Crucifer 

 from any Somerset locality beyond the Avon bank ; and yet the 

 species is intermittently spread from Yorkshire to Bristol and Pem- 

 broke. It is remarkably distributed on the continent, and recorded 

 from N. Africa to western Asia. — H. Stuaiit Thompson. 



REVIEW. 



The Trees, SJirnhs, and Plants of Vlrqil. By John Satjoeaunt. 

 Oxford: B. H. Blackvvell, 8vo. cl. pp. vii, 149. 



In speaking of this modest but pleasant and pleasantlj^ turned- 

 out little book, we feel an uncomfortable sense of likeness to a to])sy- 

 turvy Balaam. It is no pleasant task to pick holes in the work of a 

 scholar who lov^es his plants, loves Virgil and the fair land of Italv, 

 which he seems to know in all its length — he speaks familiarly of the 

 liills of Bologna, of Taranto, of Sicily, and even of the Ionian coast 

 between Cotrone and Capo Nau, trodden by few foreign and even 

 fewer Italian feet, other than those who earn their daily bread on 

 those desolate shores. 



The subject is approached in the right spirit by pointing out that 

 Virgil had a native power of observation, combined with a young- 

 man's passion for the beautiful language of the Greek pastoral 

 poets — tendencies not always in accord ; the literary influence pre- 

 vails, for " Virgil seems at times " [we should say, oftener than not] 

 " to think less of the objects with which he deals than of his desire 

 to reproduce in the graver, not to say heavier, language of Rome the 

 beauties of the Sicilian poets." But this point of view is not always 

 maintained in the attempt to identify nearly all the poet's plant- 

 names with definite species, for the most part natives of Italy. 



Although Virgil owned a small estate near Mantua, where he was 

 born, we nmst not, except in certain cases, look for his plants in 

 northern Ital^^ The Georgics were — at least in part — written at 

 Naples, where he is said by Macrobius to have learned Greek as a 

 young man ; he had accompanied Horace on the famous journey 

 to Brindisi before the Georgics were begun, and he saw with his own 

 eyes the more brilliant flora of Greece. Nevertheless, his flora, like 

 his agriculture, when not a mere echo of Theocritus or other Greek 

 poets, is certainly that of Central Itiily. It is impossible to say how 



