6 



title of a monthly Journal. The three articles are important contri- 

 butions to science, undoubtedly of high merit in themselves, and 

 include only matters proper and necessary to be recorded. But 

 nevertheless, we submit, they are not the kind of articles which are 

 looked for by subscribers to a periodical. A good description of the 

 Plants of Van Diemen's Land, for example, in a volume or series of 

 volumes, as a distinct work, would be now a very valuable contribu- 

 tion to the literature of botany ; but broken up into incomplete frag- 

 ments, detached from each other by the miscellanies of a periodical, 

 the list appears in a most inconvenient form itself, and seems greatly 

 out of place. We give these hints in a spirit of friendliness to the 

 'London Journal,' which we would gladly see rendered as much as 

 possible a full and undiluted Journal of botany : at present, it is a 

 Miscellany (the original title) of high value, but scarcely a Journal. 



Among the " Botanical Information " in Number 69 are some items 

 of intelligence which will have interest for the devotee of British 

 botany. We are there assured that the Calamagrostis stricta from 

 Oakmere, Cheshire, " is identical with the Forfarshire plant, found by 

 the late Mr. G. Don," and " quite distinct from C. lapponica, of which 

 the only British station is in the county of Antrim, Ireland." By 

 some inadvertence (arising, we understand, from the hasty inspection 

 of an imperfect specimen), Mr. Hussey's discovery of Phalaris para- 

 doxa, " in a field, near Swanage, Dorset," is announced for another 

 species, or rather genus, the Alopecurus utriculatus, placed by Lin- 

 neus under the genus Phalaris. The two grasses resemble each other 

 in their peculiarly inflated sheaths or bases of the leaves, and when 

 the upper portion of the dense panicle of Phalaris paradoxa happens 

 to be lost by breaking off, there is truly a close eye-sight resemblance 

 between them, dissimilar as they are found to be on closer examina- 

 tion of the flowers (see Phytol. ii. 961). The discovery of Simethis 

 bicolor (Kunth) in Hampshire, and of Allium sphaerocephalum (Linn.) 

 near Bristol, were announced simultaneously in the ' Phytologist ' 

 (see Phytol. ii. pp. 926 and 961). The other British plant mentioned 

 is the Trifolium strictum (Linn.), discovered in two localities in 

 Cornwall, by the Rev. C. A. Johns; from whose pen there is an 

 interesting note on this one along with other small leguminose plants 

 of that county. 



Dr. Planchon's article on the Linaceae is elaborately worked out, 

 and is rendered somewhat remarkable by the addition of a large table 

 in which the geographical distribution of the species is shown under 



