PIOEA 85 



modern times has taken more trouble in describing these 

 forms than any of his predecessors, but in many cases 

 he does not enter sufficiently into detail to enable one to 

 distinctly identify a form; and this is unfortunate, as 

 most of his descriptions appear to be of forms which he 

 himself had actually seen, and in the absence of adequate 

 identification and of their locality, many of them are lost 

 to us and cannot be traced. It would also appear from 

 other of his descriptions that already many false forms had 

 crept into the Continental nurseries, and that he there- 

 fore, at times, described not the true but the existing 

 " trade " form — an example of this is his var. Gregoriana. 

 What percentage of his descriptions is unreliable on this 

 account is now impossible to say, and many of his descrip- 

 tions have had to be incorporated without the chance of 

 verification, but fortunately there are still, as I already 

 mentioned in my General Preface, occasional specimens 

 in existence which from their age or other circumstances 

 may be regarded as probably authentic and original, and 

 from these it has been possible in some cases to verify or 

 correct his descriptions. A case in point is the var. 

 Gregoriana already mentioned. There is a very old 

 plant of this at Kew, and an identical form to this was 

 propagated and distributed for, anyhow, forty years by 

 Veitch. Having regard to the age of this form, and also 

 to the fact that it fulfils all the conditions (and they are 

 not many) of the earhest recorded description — that of 

 Gordon — one may assume that the Kew form is probably 

 the true one, and that Beissner's, which was first described 

 in 1891 and differs considerably, is not true. 



While many of the true forms are very difficult to 

 procure, there are too many false forms for existing 

 authentic names; and for some, which are definitely 

 separated from their assumed names of the trade and 

 cannot be identified with any other recorded description, 

 new names have been found. 



Considering their number, it is astounding how many of 



