557 
rather damp. You now know all the worst: but 
the whole country round is beautiful in the extreme, 
—such hills, such rich valleys, such extensive views, 
such rides, such roads, as are not to be met with 
scarcely anywhere. An excellent neighbourhood, 
and within a mile and a half of the market town, 
Maidstone, where we get tolerably well supplied 
with everything. I shall long for you to see it. 
But this must, I fear, be a distant pleasure. 
I should have been glad to have had a quiet talk 
by ourselves concerning Salisbury’s strange conduct. 
I neveradmired him; and from a warm conversation 
I once had with him about changing of the nomen- 
clature of the genus L7vica, I thought him too wild 
to take a lead. In that same conversation Dryan- 
der took part with me, and dressed him in his rough- 
est manner. When you have to consider that you 
and Sir Joseph Banks divide the empire of the 
botanical world, you have a clue to all the awkward 
oddities to which such a circumstance necessarily 
exposes you. Well managed, these whimsicalities 
are mere ephemera: in angry hands the posses- 
sion of a butterfly might disturb the universe : 
nothing is so prolific as strife. 
I have seen here Mieracium umbellatum, Chrysos- 
plenium oppositifolium, Hedypnois hieracioides, Cre- 
pis brennis, with many others fond of a chalky soil. 
I have looked in vain through the neighbourhood 
of Rochester for Viola hirta. Orchis militaris B 
is surely no variety. 
S. GOODENOUGH. 
