3 



visited that wild scene, accompanied by the person said to have 

 brought them — the intelligent guide, Mr. Wright. He did not, 

 indeed, express any very sanguine expectation of being able to show 

 me the plant wild ; for he had " found but little, and left less, and he 

 had heard that parties had since been in search of it : but he could 

 show me the very spot where he got it." Accordingly, the spot was 

 shown, but empty ; and a search of five hours on that desolate steep 

 of broken precipice and loose debris was altogether unsuccessful, 

 although we had the statement of another person — of no great credit, 

 as I learned afterwards, for accuracy of assertion — that another part 

 of the Screes, so described that I had no doubt we found it, pro- 

 duced the desideratum " in cart loads." This visit was made early in 

 June. At the latter end of July I was again in Wasdale, where I 

 obtained information that the plant had been looked for in the Screes 

 many times, and by various parties, in vain, but that it was to be 

 found in a wood by the river half a mile from San ton Bridge, some 

 three miles from Nether Wasdale. There I found it, and wild enough 

 in appeai'ance it was : but equally so were Erica vagans, and several 

 foreign shrubs not uncommon in our gardens ; and I have not the 

 least doubt that it and they were alike introduced by a former pro- 

 prietor, the projector of a moss-house there, now in decay, and of 

 walks now overgrown. I then called on a nurseryman in the neigh- 

 bourhood, the reported discoverer of our plant in the Screes. He 

 laughed at the idea of his " scrambling after a plant in the Screes, too 

 dangerous a place," he said, for him : but his foreman, he told me 

 (and the man himself confirmed it), had more than once hunted for it 

 there in vain, and so had a neighbouring clergyman. How the 

 notion that it grew there originated, he knew not. I had heard that 

 he had received a prize for it, as the best British plant exhibited, 

 from a flower-club, at Whitehaven. He was not sure whether he had 

 or had not : he had gained several prizes there. I heard reports, but 

 too vague for investigation, of two other wild stations of the plant in 

 question ; one in Borrowdale, the other near Cockermouth. I may 

 add, that the late Rev. R. F. Bree was very positive that he had 

 gathered it "in Helvellyn, near the summit." He said that he had 

 presented the specimens, with the rest of his herbarium, to a society 

 at Boulogne. 



Saxifraga rotundifolia. In June, 1844, I obtained from Miss 

 Wright, of Keswick, a specimen of this beautiful Saxifrage, " gathered 

 by herself, some years since, near the foot of Causey Pike, where it is 

 not now to be found." Miss Wright's account encourages a hope that 



