ON ANOMOCLADA. 169 



I have compared the Amazon plant with specimens of 0. Sphagni 

 from various part of Europe and North America, and can find no 

 essential difference. Fine fruiting specimens from Lindberg (e monte 

 Hunneberg, Suecia) have the leaves nearly twice as large, and some- 

 times broader than long, but always ovato-orbicular — broadest a little 

 below the middle — concave, assurgent, indistinctly margined with 

 quadrate cells, and of the same internal structure as in the South 

 American plant. Bracts of $ flower bifid, segments sometimes 

 laciniato-ciliate. Perianth above three times as long as the stem- 

 leaves, 6 -cleft at the apex by the protrusion of the capsule, laciniee 

 eubciliate. The last character affords the only tangible distinction 

 from the variety amazonica, which has the perianth at first closed, 

 finally bursting like a spathe by a lateral subapical slit ; rarely cir- 

 cumscissile, and very rarely indeed split at the very apex aa in the 

 European form, but less regularly. 



The fertile plant is rare in Britain, but has been gathered by 



howling beneath their feet on the bleak winter nights, at least whilst the " last 

 wolf " was still prowling in the Forest of Galtres. 



Strensall Moor, Stockton Forest, Langwith Moor, &c., are all relics of the 

 Forest of Galtres, an ancient royal demesne of the Saxon kings, in which roamed 

 the stag, bear, wolf, and wild boar. A perambulation made in the ninth year of 

 Edward II. found it to extend from the walls of York northwards nearly twenty 

 miles, viz., to Isurium (Aldburgh), and eastwards to the river Derwent. 

 Several hamlets had sprung up on it, and a few solitary granges— moated round 

 to protect the inmates from wolves, biped and quadruped. [One of these moated 

 granges was still the only habitation on Langwith Moor in 1842, when I showed 

 Mr. Borrer Jung. Francisci in fruit growing close by.] Camden calls it " Calate- 

 rium Nemus, vulgo TJie Forest of Galtres . . . arboribus alicubi opacum, alicubi 

 uliginosa planitie madescens," In his time it stretched northwards only to 

 Craike Castle and the source of the river Foss : ^^ Fossa, amnis piger . . . . 

 originem habet ultra Castellum Huttonicum, terminatque fines Calaterii 

 nemoris, &c." {Brit., fol. 1607, p. 588). What remains of it now is only here 

 and there a fragmentary " uliginosa planitie " — still rich in Sphagna, bog Hypna, 

 and numerous other Mosses and Jungermwmice— to say nothing of nobler plants 

 — and in the drier parts adorned with wide beds of Cetraria islandica and 

 Cenoini/ce rangiferlana, associated with Dicrmium spuri/im, Bartramia arcuata, 

 Racomitrium lanuginosiim (often fertile), and other tall Mosses. 



Tradition reports — but adds no date to the supposed fact — that the last wolf 

 in England was killed on the borders of the Forest of Galtres, at Stittenham, 

 two miles from where I am writing, by one of the Gowers, of which noble 

 family Stittenham was (and still is) an ancient possession. The crest of the 

 Gowers is " a wolf passant argent," &c., and over the family vault in the neigh- 

 bouring charch of Sheriff- Button are suspended the funereal trophies of a Gower, 

 viz., a casque, gauntlets, &c., and a pennon, now faded, but said to have bee:i 

 blazoned with the representation of a combat between a man and a wolf. Whether, 

 however, the badge was assumed from that heroic action, or the tradition was 

 founded on the badge, let the heralds decide. 



I conclude this note by earnestly beseeching our local botanists to lose no 

 time in exploring the moors that still remain untouched by cultivation in the 

 Vale of York and elsewhere. On the wide plain between the Ouse and the 

 foot of the wolds there are still left several patches of moor which have never 

 been thoroughly examined for Cryptogamia. On one of these— Barmby Moor — 

 I found the rare Scalia Hookeri, Ljell, in fruit on November 6th, 1842, and I 

 suppose I and Mr. Curnow are the only living botanists who have gathered it in 

 Britain ; but Gottsche finds it near Hamburg, and Lindberg at Helsingfors. 

 In 1866 I gathered a second species, Scalia andina, MSS.— thrice the size of its 

 European congener — in the eastern Andes of Peru. 



