CAMPANULA. 
precise repetition, except that the entire tuft is clothed in down 
instead of being perfectly green and smooth; while the leafage is 
smaller, the habit more decumbent, and the flowers, which are very 
nearly if not quite as large as in its bigger rival, are not so deeply cleft, 
forming more perfect cups, from which the stigma slightly projects. 
C. saxatilis was long the disconcertingly doubtful name of a species 
disconcertingly rare, seen once or twice on the North coast of Crete, 
and then for many a season despaired of, until the same thing, ora form 
intimately allied to it, was found in the Carpathians. C. sazatilis 
is a species of quite pre-eminent beauty (even after the last)—a rock- 
plant, imitating C. Raineri in all its habit and beauty, and perhaps 
actually threatening the supremacy of its almost unsurpassable model ; 
for here, though the leaves, tuffets, and so forth are nearly inter- 
changeable (but the leaves are more oblong-spoon-shaped), and the 
shoots upon their stems of an inch or two carry likewise as many as 
five flowers, these flowers themselves strike out a different line of 
grandeur, tubular deep bells of the richest sapphire velvet and amplest 
size. There is also a variety C. s. Simonellii, with only one bloom to 
a shoot, which must be a treasure ; but meanwhile we have yet got 
to acquire the type, which must be more of a treasure still. 
C'. Saxifraga, however, we already possess, to our delight, though 
the most unnecessary confusion prevails between this species and the 
allied C’. tridentata ; till, in the weakness of despair, many lists throw 
up their hands, and make the two synonymous. C. Sazifraga, like 
the other, makes a series of tufts, composed of low-lying narrow 
leafage, tapering by degrees to a stalk; and above this, on single 
stems of 2 or 3 inches, appear magnificent violet bells, suggesting those 
of C. alpestris, but more abundant, thrown out from the rosette in 
numbers instead of standing solitary and horizontal-belled, one in the 
middle of each. The differences between this and the closely-allied 
C. tridentata are marked and simple. The habit is the same; but in 
C. Saxifraga the narrow leaves are quite untoothed at the edge, or else, if 
toothed, are toothed from the middle of the leaf along to its tip, instead of 
merely having some three or five marked notches acrogs their very end, 
as in C. tridentata ; the calyx-segments, too, are longer here in pro- 
portion to the corolla. This royal Amethyst replaces C. alpestris in 
steep rocky places between 4000 and 5000 feet in the Northern Caucasus 
and away to Russian Armenia, while C. tridentata occupies the same 
rough stony grounds, and fulfils the same high function, in Pontus 
and Cappadocia at much greater altitudes, between 6500 and 10,000 feet. 
They both have the needs and respond heartily to the treatment of 
C. alpestris, even as they follow it in the same line of loveliness. 
197 
