21 
What we Fount. 
F we wish to convince ourselves of the infinite variety which 
nature so lavishly spreads before us, we cannot do better 
than narrowly examine, at the various seasons of the year, one 
locality, easily ‘‘come-at-able,”’ and of definite limits; we shall 
be astonished at finding how many species of Flowering Plants 
alone may be gathered in a comparatively small area. Most of 
our readers know the straight piece of road, about two and a half 
miles in length, which extends from High to West Wycombe. 
On the right hand side is a hedge, high in some parts, and very 
dusty; on the left, a lower hedge, between which and the road 
is a narrow grassy patch. While walking along this road on the 
11th of June last, it occurred to us to gather a specimen of each 
plant then in blossom on the right hand side of the road alone ; 
and on arriving at West Wycombe we found that our bouquet 
numbered fifty-eight species! Besides these, there was at least 
an equal number, the blossoms of which had either not yet ex- 
panded, or had already withered; and we do not in the least 
exaggerate, when we state that one hundred and twenty species 
of British plants flower, at different times of the year, in this 
dusty hedge, all widely varying one from the other in many im- 
portant particulars. The number on the other side of the road 
would doubtless have been far greater. The railway, on one 
side, which produces the rarer species of Salad Burnet (Poterium 
muricatum) and the Woad (satis tinctoria), has its own distinct 
class of plants; and so has the river, on the other side of the road: 
all of them interesting, many of them beautiful, some of them 
rare. We may mention that among the fifty-eight species 
gathered were the Long-stalked Crane’s-bill (Geranium colum- 
binum) and Buxbaum’s Speedwell ( Veronica Buxbaumit), neither 
of them common, and that the Yellow Stonecrop (Sedum acre) 
