623 



interesting subject of Fairy-rings. After alluding to the theory here 

 broached of their being " caused by a species of vegetable matter, 

 which progresses from the centre of each of them, and spreads larger 

 and larger in a circle, causing the grass to be greener on the rim 

 than it is either within or without the circle;" Mr. Allies proceeds 

 to inform us that " upon the rim of one of them being dug into, 

 a whitish, fibrous, starchy-looking matter appears under the sod, 

 amongst the roots of the grass, and at certain seasons, several species 

 of Fungi or agarics grow in great number on such rims." In a note 

 to the word ' fibrous ' Mr. Allies adds, " That it is fibrous T believe 

 there can be no doubt; for several years ago I had a portion of it 

 examined by a gentleman, with a powerful microscope, who pronoun- 

 ced it to be fibrous." Of course, no one will doubt that the spawn is 

 fibrous after such authority as this, but we arrived at the same conclu- 

 sion by the assistance of our unai*med eye. And here we would have 

 laid down our pen, and reckoned our case established, but " Audi et 

 alteram partem'''' is a wise and unanswerable rule; we therefore cite 

 an authority on the other side of the question. In the Wiltshire Col- 

 lection of Aubrey relative to the ' fairies,' published about the middle 

 of the seventeenth century, we have the following theory of Fairy- 

 rings. " As to these circles, I presume they are generated from the 

 breathing out of a fertile subteraneous vapour, which comes from a 

 kind of conical concave, and endeavours to get out of a narrow pas- 

 sage at the top, which forces it to make another inversely situated to 

 the other, the top of which is the green circle." 



The reader is permitted to adopt the theory of which he most 

 approves. O. P. 



The Indigenous Plants of the Mauritius. 



Nearly sixty years ago, a paper was read at a meeting of the Lin- 

 nean Society, which must have occasioned no little mirth among the 

 members present. It was written by Sir J. E. Smith, the Founder 

 and first President of the Society, and entitled a " Review of a Dutch 

 edition of the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus." This book was a folio 

 volume, in Dutch, French, and English ; and was published at the 

 Hague, in 1765. Sir James says : "I have often contemplated this 

 production with equal wonder and contempt, and have amused my- 

 self in conjecturing how the ignorant compiler of it could fall into 

 such strange errors as he has done." Passing strange, indeed, are 



