deductions be sound, two or three plants now living near our feet take us back 

 direct, by a single leap, to the ages long past. I am quite aware that geology 

 deals with periods to which these are but moments, and that the unregarded 

 stone which mends our roads, or is rolled along by the current of the brook, is 

 an antiquity before which the earliest works of man are mere novelties of yester- 

 day. Botanical pursuits afford us no such grand visions of unrecorded time ; 

 but the little they furnish we may not the less thankfully receive. Facts like 

 that which I thus venture to chronicle, show at any rate that botany, too, has its 

 side of mystery — its hints of long-past days, its matter for the poet and the 

 speculator, amid all the admitted dryness of its terminology and its descriptions. 



In the conversation which followed, Mr. Symonds noticed the fact pointed 

 out to him by Mr. Lees, of two fresh plants having made their appearance on a 

 railway embankment in Worcestershire. The Rev. Mr. Lewis observed that 

 the spoil-heaps of coal-pits were generally quickly covered with clover. The 

 President remarked that if poppies had grown in a field, although it might be 

 laid down in grass for fifty years afterwards, whenever again broken up, poppies 

 would be sure to spring up. Mr. Edmunds had found two plants of Verbascum 

 blattaria, last summer, in a road at Widemarsh. That plant is not common 

 anywhere, he believed, and had certainly not been seen lately in the spot where 

 he had found it. Dr. Bull observed that, about seven years ago, V. blattaria 

 had made its appearance on the Abergavenny tram-road, and then as suddenly 

 disappeared. 



A hope was expressed that other members would furnish notices of incidents 

 illustrating the natural history of the county. 



