ASTRAGALUS. 
seed.) I propose, then, first of all to take such European species as 
we have, and deal with-them ; then cursorily to suggest the names of 
such foreigners as have sounded to me as if they might perhaps be 
beautiful. It cannot be promised that all such species will fulfil that 
promise, nor that the mesh of this net shall not have let some worthy 
species slip through ; in any case it should feed up the amateur of 
Astragalus with hopes for some little time to come ; and, in the mean- 
time, as with Aster or any large race prolific in rubbish, the enthusiast 
may well find it a help and a saving to purchase no _ species 
unmentioned in this book, unless with the fullest and most alluring 
credentials and description. 
But few of our own alpine species are worth attention, and the 
very name A. alpina, that accepted promise of good things, belongs 
to a rather feeble little pallor, whose cluster-bunches of small blue- 
and-white flowers we all know, in the upper turf of the mountain 
pastures. (This is also Phaca astragalina (DC.), the other alpine Phacas 
being yet inferior things, often weedy, with yellow blossoms.) A. 
danicus, however, is really a most dainty small beauty for the sunny 
rock or moraine, forming neat and perfectly dwarf mats of little leaves, 
arranged in pairs of tiny greyish rounded leaflets, among which nestle 
the heads of comparatively fine Pea-flowers, which in the variety 
albus are especially pretty. 
A. alopecuroeides, on the other hand, is a type of the rank and tall- 
growing development of the family from lusher places—a branch 
which this list, seeking choice alpines only, has not touched. A. 
alopecuroeides rises from 18 inches to 3 feet, standing erect, with leaves 
of a fine green, very long and narrow and delicate, like a big Asplenium 
viride’s, but with the pinnae narrower and pointed, composed of 
twenty-five or thirty oval leaflets; the flowers, in dense cylindric 
fox-brush bunches, are of a golden yellow. This plant is a rarity, 
from sub-alpine regions in the valley of Cogne, &c. 
A. aristatus deserves mention as being the type, in the European 
southern Alps, of tho spiny desert-section of the family. In the 
_Graians, Cottians, and Maritimes especially, on high and barren hot 
slopes, it forms mounds and mats of spiny branches, in which nestle 
the dowdy little heads of yellow flower, in the wings of the minute 
leaves. 
A. hypoglottis is an alpine species often seen in cultivation, much 
finer than A. alpinus, but of the same prostrate habit, hairy and 
diffuse upon the ground. The bunch of bloom stands erect, about 
an inch long or more, made up of handsome violet blossoms in an 
almost globular head. The leaves are composed of some eight or 
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