SAXIFRAGA. 



it advances towards flowering-force. And, even when, as a doddering 

 veteran, you see the blossom of the baby you successfully inserted 

 fifty years before, there may well arise in your mind a doubt as to 

 whether hope, as always, was not richer joy than any actual fulfil- 

 ment. The type, of course, varies, but there is no question that the 

 eight or ten tufts that bloomed in England in 1913 were a grievous 

 disappointment. In the first place the spike is very stiff and stocky, 

 in the second the calyces are very large and fluffy and baggy, in the 

 third the petals are very short and narrow, hardly showing beyond 

 the sepals, and. in effect, mere dim little flimsy tabs of pallid pink, 

 weak in texture as in colour and breadth and show. So that the stout 

 hanging spire of such bells was not received with enthusiasm or lost 

 with regret. There still remains, however,, the hope of better forms. 

 The history of S.florulenta is most curious, and may be found set forth 

 at fuller length in my book Among the Hills. Ardoino's account is 

 a cento of errors that have begotten further errors (as in H. Mac- 

 millan's book on the Riviera), and the facts of the tale are these. 

 The plant was discovered by Molinari in 1820, named and figured by 

 M cetti in 1824. After this all trace and tradition of it was lost, and 

 for many years the notion of a great rose-spired Euaeizoon, clinging 

 in the stark and sunless granites round the Argentera, was taken to be 

 such a mere myth that the name was transferred to 8. lingulata lanto- 

 sca?ia, an error that now lingers only in the last Kew Hand List, where 

 the oldest and loneliest species of its race still figures as tho false 

 synonym of a variety in a wide and common type. In 1840, however, 

 Bremond and Barla went collecting one day up the valley of the 

 Madonna della Finestra. At lunch they foregathered at the Hospice of 

 Our Lady of the Window with an unknown English tourist (who has 

 always remained nameless), and afterwards the three went wander- 

 ing separately among the huge cliffs and gaunt granitic needles that 

 enclose the little shrine in a goblet of silence. At the end of the day 

 they gathered there again to compare notes of their finds ; the two 

 experienced collectors produced mountain-flowers in goodly store, but 

 nothing of especial note. And then the unwitting stranger opened his 

 box, rilled with a hundred things of which he knew no name. And 

 among them lay a certain mythical stiff spike beset with hanging bells 

 of pink I S. florvlenta was never lost again, but all subsequent botanists 

 have taken their pride in having a good acquaintance with it. The 

 ways are hard and stern and far ; yet, high up in some districts of the 

 Maritimes there is no lack of the royal stately Saxifrage hanging from 

 the sheer grim cliffs ; in sombre splondour of the rosette alone, the most 

 exciting spectacle of those or any other Alps, no matter what may bo 



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