﻿102 Le Jolis-Hovve: Porella once more 



H 



M. Auguste Le Jol 



Mr. Marshall 



>we seems to have somewhat misunderstood my papers on 

 Porella, for I have never written 'that Dickson considered his 

 Jungermannia Porella to be different from the Porella of Dillenius'; 

 on the contrary, I have said that Dickson, having compared his 

 Jungermannia with the specimen of Dillen, did find out that the 

 two plants were alike." M. Auguste Le Jolis would have given 

 a somewhat more accurate idea of what I really wrote if his 

 quotation marks had been a little more widely inclusive. My 

 statement was : * "Mr. James Dickson was the first to detect 

 that the Porella of Dillenius belonged to the Jungermaniaceae, and 

 it may be worth while to quote his narrative of the circumstances, 

 especially as M. Le Jolis has somewhat recently f given the im- 

 pression that the discovery was wholly a chance affair and also 

 that Dickson considered his Jungermannia Porella to be different 

 from the Porella of Dillenius." The last half of this « impression " 

 of mine was derived from the following words of M. Le Jolis : J 



[D 



espece,/a considerant avec raison comme nouvelle § et en souvenir du 

 nom de Dillenius la nomme Jungermannia Porella:' If M. Le 

 Jolis meant by « nouvelle " simply that the species had not hitherto 

 i entered in the genus Jungermania we owe him an apology. 



He should be allowed the p^vn^c m interpreting nis own words. 

 It is true that in the preceding lines (/. c.) he had stated that 

 Dickson " reconnut que les deux plantes etaient semblables." But 

 "semblable" seems to a foreigner to have a slightly dubious 

 meaning, especially in connection with such words as cited above, 

 and, I suspect, does not exhaust the possibilities of the French 

 language for expressing Dickson's complete conviction as to the 

 specific identity of the two specimens. 



Dickson himself says on this point: "Upon the most 



examination, I found my Jungermania to agree exactly 



with his Porella, but could find no fructification upon his speci- 



Mr 



men. 



As I have no doubt that my J 



*BuII. Torr. Bot. Club, 24 : 513. 1897. 

 f Rev. Bryol. 19: 99. 1892. 

 JRev. Bryol. 19: 99, line 33. LS92. 

 i The italics are ours. 



