512 



ingenuity, so constructs his description that it shall apply to both. 

 When an author has thus taken great pains to show that his plant, al- 

 though named, is only a variety, when he has been at the trouble of 

 placing a specific name over it as if the more to enforce its restriction 

 to the variety, surely the name of that variety cannot, by any law of 

 botanical usage, be introduced to supersede a name accompanied by a 

 specific description, and applied without doubt or hesitation to the 

 same plant as a distinct species. 



I may perhaps be allowed, before concluding this brief paper, to 

 confess that the result of this inquiry has not been such as I antici- 

 pated ; for fi"om the moment Mr. Watson announced to me his disco- 

 very of the identity of the British and Madeira plants, I concluded to 

 give up the name of recurva, since its adoption seemed rather annoy- 

 ing to some of my friends who had advocated a change. A candid 

 investigation of the matter has been attended with a different result, 

 and the present, like every other inquiry into the propriety of retain- 

 ing the name recurva, seems to issue in establishing that name more 

 firmly than before. 



Edward Newman. 



9, Devonshire Street, 



Bishopsgate, 13 April, 1846. 



Botanical Ramble in Ireland. By Charles Carter, Esq. 



I VENTURE to give you a slight outline of a ramble through a part 

 of Clare in July last. Business conducting me at stated times 

 throughout the year, to the west of Ireland, and having occasionally 

 many days of leisure, I thought I could not devote them to a better 

 purpose than to the study of Nature. To such pursuits 1 have been 

 led by the delightful excursions recorded in your excellent journal, 

 by Professor Balfour to Ailsa Craig and the Mull of Cantyre, and by 

 Mr. Keddie to the Bass Rock, but above all by that of Mr. Ogilby in my 

 own localities, picturing so vividly and so poetically, beauties that 

 many minds are wholly insensible to. His is the spirit of a true na- 

 turalist. I hate your dry pedantic lore — your freezing descriptions of 

 Nature's works : very few are the converts to science made by such ! 



In September last, being with some friends in the neighbourhood 

 of Clifden, I had heard of Mr. Ogilby, as an accomplished naturalist 

 and botanist, being there. He had discovered another station for the 



