112 Transactions. 
I may be asked whether the people of Annan were as much 
“given to intellectual pursuits” in the days when Blacklock 
experienced the bitterness of learning at the parish school as at 
the time when Carlyle first wielded the birch in the Academy ? 
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? 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 his 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 the bricklayer was not singular in his love o¢ 
good literature—that even 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 
Davinson, 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. With the advent of the winter rains all this is 
