276 . THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



The plant is so commonly (though inaccurately) known in gardens 

 as O. coccineum that no general inconvenience will result from the 

 change, which, as I have said, Avould seem to be necessary'- if the 

 Vienna Rules be followed. — James Biutten. 



LiLTUM Martagon L. The following extract from a letter from 

 John Stuart Mill to Sir William Hooker, dated 26 January. 1881, 

 preserved in the Hooker corres])ondence at Kew, seems worth printing : 

 " I send you . . . the Liliiim Mnrfagon, a plant new to the British 

 flora, but certainly wild, and, as far as it is possible to judge, indi- 

 genous. It fills, as I imagine, nearly the whole of an extronely thick 

 and close coppice wood, near Headley in Surrey. I first saw it about 

 four years ago, when the coppice, or rather a part of it, was cut down, 

 and the ground was seen to be covered with this plant ; but as it 

 never fiowered I did not know what it was, though I wondered at it 

 a good deal ; but in June this A^ear (I believe shortly after I wrote 

 the notes on your Flora to which I owe the ])rivilege of corresponding 

 with you) I discovered in an(jther corner of tlie wood a considerable 

 number of full-grown plants all of them on the point of flowering, 

 two of which 1 gathered and now send to you. They are badly pre- 

 served, but there is no doubt of the identity of the plant, and as little 

 of its being completely wild: if it ever escaped from a garden, it must 

 have been at a very remote period, for there is no garden near, and 

 the immense abundance of the plant in this coppice proves that, if not 

 indigenous, it is as completely naturalized as a plant can possibly be." 

 From this it would seem that Mr. Dunn's note {Alien Flora, p. 183) 

 — " commonly cultivated in gardens in England and recorded in many 

 localities as naturalised in their neighbourhood" — is curiously mis- 

 leading so far as this first recorded habitat is concerned. Mill referred 

 to this letter in a note to Alexander Irvine printed in the Pliyfoloyiat 

 (N. S. ii. 554), where he says: "About 1829 I found it in flower, 

 and, I believe, wrote to Sir W. Hooker about it ; but he, as you know, 

 repudiated it as a British plant." The plant was figured in E. Bot. 

 Suppl. t. 2799 (May 1, 1837) ; the accompanying text states that the 

 copse at Woodmanstone, five miles from Epsom, whence the specimen 

 was sent, is locally known as " Turk's-cap Shaw " ; " it is remembered 

 bv the older people of the neighbourhood to have flourished truly wihl 

 jn that locality for more than half a century." Fi'om this locality it 

 is recorded in Loudon's Mag. Nat. Hist. iii. 152 (1830). 



"English Botany." In connection with thi reference on p. 249 

 it may be worth w bile to transcribe the following paragraph in LouiJnii'n 

 Magazine of Natural History (i. 304; 1828), from which it will be 

 seen that the jwrallel between the descriptions and the illustrations (f 

 this work and The Cambridge British Flora is clo er than was indi- 

 cated. An anonymous correspondent had endeavoured to claim for 

 Sowerby a greater share in English Botany than could be rightly 

 attributed to him : " Mr. James Sowerby 's name," he says, "should 

 be stated as the projector of that great and useful work," and it is 

 added that Sowerby wrote "a part of the first volume himself." On 

 this his son, James de Carle Sowerby, wrote as follows : — 



" At p. 198 I have observed that some well-meaning friend, 

 desirous of doing a service to the memory of mv lamented father in 



