ee ee ee 
31 
by your own observation is worth 50 taken on trust from 
books, or picked up by listening to a paper like this. I shall 
be glad to supply you with names and localities of our mari- 
time plants. 
Many, if not most, of these fleshy sea-side plants contain 
iodine, and also large quantities of various salts of soda. 
Some few of them, as Thrift, Sea-Plaintain, and Scurvy-grass 
are also found inland, in which case they are at or near the 
summits of our highest mountains. In this latter situation 
these plants, instead of the salts of soda, contain salts of 
potash. These salt-containing plants are so distinctly marked 
that the Greek compound Halophy?es, or salt plants, has been 
formed for them. 
Now I think there can be no doubt that in some way or 
the other—often not understood by us in our present state of 
the knowledge—these peculiarities are efforts on the part of 
our plants at accommodating themselves to circumstances. 
When, for example, we consider the case of Samphire growing 
in apparently barren chinks in the face of the chalk cliff, or 
rooted deep in the still more barren flint shingle; or of the 
Sea-Campion growing also on the shingle; or of the Sea- 
Gromwell on the utterly bare shores of our most Northern 
coasts, and find them all fine healthy plants, we see that they 
must possess some power of picking up a right good living 
where almost all plants would certainly starve. They have 
but little soil to trust to, and that little is always either very 
poor or very salt, and in either case unfavourable to the free 
developement of vegetable life. Accordingly they must get 
most of their sustenance from the air, and but little from the 
ground in which they grow. On the driest and most parched 
parts of the globe we find, as in the deserts of Africa, vegeta- 
tion, and of what nature? Cactus, or cactus-like plants without 
exception—that is, once more, fleshy and unusually glaucous 
plants. Now in the case of these latter it is obvious that all 
the food they get must be from the air, and so it is no doubt 
with our sea-side plants. 
I had once a plant of the Cactus kind, Crassula sulcata, a 
plant I have often seen in windows in Folkestone, and it con- 
tinued to flower long after the whole lower part of the plant 
was entirelydead. When I examined it I found at the bottom 
of the still living portion of the plant a little whorl of fibre 
