322 SCIRPUS PARVULUS. 
their lower portion, which is buried in the mud, green above, soft and 
fistular throughout, consisting of 4 or 5 longitudinal tubes divided 
into narrow cells by numerous transverse partitions, and surrounded at 
the base by one exceedingly thin, transparent, oblique, close-pressed 
sheath. Spikes yellowish, ovate-oblong, about three times as broad as 
the top of the stem, with 1 thickly-ribbed empty glume at the base 
and about 5 membranous, green-nerved, fertile glumes above. Sta- 
mens 3, very large for the size of the plant. Stigmas 3. Nut quite 
smooth, obovate-trigonous, tipped by the permanent base of the style 
and surrounded by 3 (or, as foreign writers say, from 4 to 6) rough 
bristles 
Has. On soft mud overflowed at high tide, in salt-marsh creeks at 
the mouth of the river Ovoca, coast of Wicklow, Ireland, 4. G. More 
(July, 1868).—Perennial. Flowers in August. 
Scirpus parvulus was first published as a British plant in the * Cata- 
logue of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh’ (1841) and in the fifth edi- 
tion of the ‘ British Flora’ (1842), having been discovered by the Rev. 
George Edwards Smith, who in 1837 collected specimens on a mud flat 
near Lymington, in Hampshire, but ona subsequent visit was unable to 
find the plant again ; nor have any other botanists succeeded, though 
the very spot has been carefully and often searched by many of our 
best explorers, especially by the late Dr. Bromfield. Hence Scirpus 
parvulus has come to be considered extinct in England, and has been 
placed in brackets in the ‘ British Flora, and excluded from the * Cy- 
bele Britannica’ and * London Catalogue.’ 
In the three last editions of the ‘ British Flora’ occurs the remark 
that Scirpus parvulus “is in habit most related to Isolepis fluitans, of 
which some consider it a dwarf variety.” I have not been able to dis- 
cover whose opinion is here quoted, for in all the foreign books which I 
have consulted I have not once met with the suggestion; though it is 
true that Sprengel, in his * Mantissa’ (1807), did at first refer S. par- 
vulus to S. fluitans,—a mistake afterwards corrected by himself in the 
* Pugillus,’ where our plant was described under the name of S. nanus. 
It will be seen that the authors of the * British Flora’ place one plant 
as a true Scirpus, and the other in the section Isolepis ; and their habit 
and characters are so different that I cannot imagine any experienced 
botanist hesitating to accept S. parvulus as now a species, whatever 
may have been its primeval ancestry. 
