THE 



JOURNAL OF BOTANY, 



BRITISH AND FOREIGN. .,,^^ 



__Vv' Y0«^ 



RUMEX RUPESTRIS, Le Gall, AS A BRITISH PLANT. 



By Henhy Tkimen, M.B., F.L.S. 



(Tab. 173.) 



That the species of Dock in this country will still reward exami- 

 nation is evidenced by the satisfactory determination of R. rupestris 

 as a native of the West of England, some account of which will be 

 found in the last year's volume (1875, pp. 294, 337). It is true that 

 this species has been before us since 1862, when Prof. Babington men- 

 tioned it with some reserve in the fifth edition of his Manual, as found 

 in Jersey ; but the Channel Islands cannot be considered part of our 

 country botanically, and this Dock does not seem to have been recorded 

 as since met with there. The species has thus remained misunderstood 

 or unknown by British botanists till Mr. Archer Briggs' fine suite of 

 specimens and careful notes have now cleared up the matter. 



The first indication in books of this Dock is in Lloyd's " Flore de la 

 Loire Inferieure " (1844), where under R. conglomeratus (p. 222) is the 

 note " plus robuste, feuil. epaisses, fruits plus gros dans les sables et 

 sur les rochers maritimes," but no varietal name is there given to it. 

 The plant had, however, been recognised as worth attention before 

 this time, for in 1834 M. J. Gay grew it at Paris from wild ISTor- 

 mandy seed, specimens then raised by him being labelled " R. con- 

 glomeratus, var. orthocladaP The date of the observation of the plant 

 in Jersey by Mr. Newbould and Prof. Babington was 1842. Accord- 

 ing to Meisner, Le Gall named it R. rupestris in 1849, but the first 

 description of that species which I have seen is in Le Gall's " Elore 

 de Morbihan" (p. 501), the date of which is 1852. In this accurate 

 book the characters are shortly and clearly given, and the plant is 

 stated to grow in the clefts of maritime rocks in Belle-ile, where it 

 was refound by Col. Debooz in 1847, and at Quiberon, Saint Gildas, 

 ^ and Arradon on the neighbouring coast. Since the date of Le Gall's 

 ' Flora, R. rupestris had been recorded from other localities on the 

 coast of Brittany and of Vendee, and also on the western shores of 

 Normandy, at Cap de Carteret, several places near Cherbourg (where 

 ^.. the late M. Thuret first gathered it in 1853), &c. Quite recently it 

 Q^ has been met with in tlie He d'Ouessant, the most western portion 

 •eg;; of France, in the latitude of Falmouth, I have not found a record 

 of its occurrence on any other part of tlie French coast. Nyman in 

 N.s. VOL. 5. [January, 1876.] b 



