SEMPER VIVUM. 



packed in effect. The stems, too, are pleasantly slender, and not 

 crowded with leaves, about 4 inches high, carrying not a sprayed head 

 so much as a scant cluster of bright and large comfortably-rayed 

 flowers of richer yellow, almost suggesting some small and stiff golden- 

 flowered Adonis in their stolid lines. (Alps of Styria.) 



S. ruthenicum has small stars and broader leaves in the same 

 style ; and S. Laharpei is a garden form. 



S. Pittoni has tongue-shaped leaves clothed in long glandular 

 hairs and shortly pointed, to build its medium-sized rosette, every leaf 

 having a purple patch at the tip. The flowers are pale yellow, and 

 the plant is extremely rare on the serpentine rocks of Kraubat in 

 Styria. 



S. grandiflorum, Haworth (for S. grandiflorum of gardens is apt 

 to be a mere variety of S. tectorum, q.v.), is one of the finest of all the 

 yellow Houseleeks, as figured in the Bot. Mag., T. 507). But the 

 history of the treasure and its home are both obscured in the past, and 

 as for its present whereabouts we may make the same inquiry as 

 about the Thane of Fife's late lady. 



CLASS II.— DIPOGOX. 

 Parts of the flowers in sixes. 



S. Eevffdlii {S. patens) has smallish yellow flowers, but they are 

 not wildly and beautifully fringy as in the foregoing. Its habit is of 

 medium size. 



S. Reginae Amaliae has all the habit and handsomeness of a big 

 bronze-purple rosetted S. tectorum. but can always be known by only 

 having the parts of the floicer in sixes instead of in twelves, no less 

 than by the smallish pale-yellow blossoms in their spraying heads on 

 stems of 10 inches. Queen Amelia is so far gone in glory that I 

 cannot now tell what she was queen of, or when, or where ; but her 

 Houseleek is more enduring, and lives on in the East of Europe, 

 outliving queens and dynasties alike. 



S. arenarium (S. Kochii) has its young offsets always rolled up in 

 round balls. It is a small neat thing, but the green rosettes are quite 

 imposing with their many points, when at last they splay out. and 

 the stout little flower-stem of 2 inches uncurls its scorpion-tail branches 

 thick-set with cream-pale large flowers that do not open out but keep 

 a ragged urn-shape in their packed recurving sprays. It is a plant of 

 South Tyrol, Styria, and Carinthia. 



351 



