42 



Goodyera repens Cypripedium Calceolus Iris piiraila 



CephalaiuLera ruhra Allium flavum Veratium Lobelianum 



Perhaps for some of them the botanist will find it expedient to stop 

 a day or two also at Baden, 



(To he contimieil). 



On the re-discovery of Raifs Habitat for Malaxis paludosa at 

 Tonhridge Wells. By John Sharp, Esq * 



Tonbridge Wells, September 10, 1844. 



Dear Sir, 



It is with feelings of no ordinary kind that T commu- 

 nicate to you the rediscovery of a plant supposed by many to be lost 

 (if indeed it were ever found) in the neighbourhood of Tonbridge 

 Wells. Last August, as Mr. Woodward and myself rambled in the 

 woods near Eridge rocks, till we came out of the grounds into a kind 

 of gr?ssy bog. Mr. Woodward, feeling fatigued by the excessive 

 heat of the day, threw^ himself on a dry part, and remarked in a casual 

 manner that Neottia spiralis grew there. As I was botanizing but a 

 few yards off, I ran to him, and seeing the plant, shouted with a voice 

 of rapture that it was Malaxis paludosa ! 



To an ardent admiration of Nature 1 have always added a great re- 

 spect for those original minds who first gave to her beauties a syste- 

 matic form. Foremost amongst these is Ray, a philosopher who lived 

 at a period, certainly not of ignorance, yet still one in which the gross- 

 est absurdities were sent forth by men who were called scientific, who 

 built their theories in their closets to account for phenomena which 

 they never witnessed, and drew inductions from data which existed 

 only in their imaginations. Although perhaps not wholly untouched 

 by the speculative manner of the day, Ray became, in the pursuit of 

 Natural History, a plain chronicler of facts, and faithfully recorded 

 what he witnessed, and no more; thus rendering to science a far more 

 important service than all those dreamers whose works now slumber 

 in peace on the shelves of the curious. Thoughts such as these, in- 

 describable but full of pleasure, caused my exultation. There was a 

 plant before me, which an old and valued botanist had described as 

 growing in this forest, — had probably found in this very spot, — more 

 than a century and a half before, a plant long anxiously though fruit- 

 lessly sought after, and which Forster inserts in his ' Flora Tonbri- 



* Addressed to and commuuicated by Edward Jenner, Esq. of Lewes. 



