492 SHORT NOTES. 



Such a number is unusually large. It is surpassed in Middlesex, but 

 I imagine is not nearly approached in any other fully-investigated 

 county, even if comparable m size with Cambridge. In Surrey the 

 list of extinctions can hardly number twenty-four, and the com- 

 parison with a large county is still more striking. In the whole 

 county of Yorkshire I do not think that there are more than a 

 dozen extinctions ; in the West Riding, itself larger than any other 

 English county, there are not more than half that number. The 

 ■ truth is that quite an exceptional number of destructive factors have 

 been at work in Cambridge. Of the three main physiographical 

 divisions of the county the clay districts (in the south-west and 

 south-east) have hardly suffered at all from the botanical point of 

 view, but it is far otherwise with the fen and chalk districts. More- 

 over, many plants were entitled to a place in the flora owing to their 

 occurrence nowhere but in one of three isolated tracts — the green- 

 sand at Gamlingay, the salt-marshes at Wisbech, and the small 

 patch (resembling the adjoining "breck" country in Suffolk) at 

 Chippenham. Most of the Chippenham plants are still to be found 

 there, but in the two other and more important districts the trans- 

 formation which has taken place has been unusually prejudicial to 

 their special plants, and therefore to the county flora. 



Concerning my note on Calamagrostis epir/eios (p. 259), Dr. F. 

 Arnold Lees assures me that it was not abundant, " not even 

 obtrusively observable," in Wicken Fen in 1868-1871. He writes : 

 — " Old species have gone or are going, new (natives) are replacing 

 them naturally. Purview of any square mile almost in our last 

 over fifty years will bear this observation out. I know several 

 Lincolnshire tracts, never encroached on by man or his drain-pipe, 

 that were sphagnoas bogs in 1870 that now are covered with Erica 

 cinerea and young Pimis, and have thousands of Gentiana Pneumo- 

 nanthe flowering thereon where not one was twenty-eight years 

 ago." — W. West, Jun. 



Bucks Plants. — I was fortunate enough this autumn to find the 

 Utricularia in the Burnham Beeches ponds in flower. It was at 

 once evident that Mr. Bruce was right in his opinion that the plant 

 is U. neglecta. Looking over an old collection of Bucks plants, I 

 find specimens of both this and Nitella transUicens, gathered in these 

 ponds many years ago, with a note of the great abundance of the 

 latter in the adjoining upper pool ; also specimens of two plants of 

 Osmunda rq/alis secured the same day in a boggy part of these 

 woods, locally known as " Egypt." Whilst treating of the flora of 

 the neighbourhood, I may add that a bramble of the Suberecti 

 group, which has long been noticed by me growing on the border 

 of Hawk Wood, Alderbourne, near Fulmer, has been identified by 

 Rev. W. Moyle Rogers as Pi. Piogersii Linton. — J. Benbow. 



A Nomenclature Note. — In the August number of the Kew 

 Bulletin (p. 198) Mr. R. A. Rolfe has described a new genus of 

 orchids from British Guiana under the name Jenmania, a name 

 which in the previous year had been adopted by Herr W. Wachter 

 for a genus of lichens {Flora, 1897, 349). I have studied this 

 lichen from the original specimens, and have pointed out that this 



