112 Transactions. 



I may be asked whether the peophj of Annan were as much 

 " given to intellectual pursuits " in the days when P.lacklock 

 experienced the bitterness of learning at the parish school as at 

 the time when Carlyle first wielded the birch in the Academy 1 

 Were the writings of Cudworth and of Chillingworth studied by 

 the devout burghers who every Sunday morning sat in their 

 worm-eaten pews in the parish church listening to the lengthened 

 discourses of the minister 1 Had the plays of Dryden and of 

 Congreve penetrated to the town ? I believe that there was in 

 Annan more intellectual activity than in most places of the kind. 

 It is certain that some of the burgesses were familiar with the 

 productions of the best English authors. The father of Thomas 

 Blacklock was but a bricklayer, yet he read the Tatler and 

 Spectator and delighted in the works of Spencer and Milton, of 

 Pope and Prior. Blacklock, as we learn from the narrative by 

 Spence prefixed to the 1756 edition of his writings, was early 

 taught by Ids father "and a few other friends" to appreciate 

 the beauties of the masterpieces of English poetry. It is evident 

 from the words of Spence, who was personally acquainted with 

 Blacklock, that tlie bricklayer was not singular in his love of 

 good literature — that ercn in the third decade of the eighteenth 

 century Annan contained not a few men of real culture. 



IV. British Plants in Southern California. By Dr Anstruther 

 Davidson, Los Angeles. 



When the writer of this touched Los Angeles, a stranger in a 

 strange land, and began to examine its botanical wonders, amidst 

 its varied and perplexing semitropic flora, it was cheering to find 

 that, among the inanimate waifs of cultivation, many were old 

 friends in changed but mostly improved circumstances. 



With plants as with man changes seem to follow their migration 

 so that one can scarcely recognise them in their altered appear- 

 ance. These variations alone would make an interesting paper^ 

 but at present I will confine -myself to the communication of the 

 different species of British plants here naturalised. 



The native flora is somewhat semitropical in character. The 

 dry warm summers parch the ground, wither up the grasses and 

 annuals, and intensify the general sterile appearance of the 

 whole country. Witli the advent of tlie winter rains all this is 



