372 



varieties, S. rupestre and Forsterianum, it appears to be less alpine in 

 its habit than most of its congeners, to judge from its stations in Ger- 

 many, Switzerland, &c. 



Cotyledon Umbilicus. On walls, rocks, and damp stony banks and 

 hedge-rows. Rare in Hants. Hedge-banks by Bohemia, Isle of 

 Wight; Mr. George Kirkpatrick !!! Abundant on hedge-banks at 

 Redbridge, at the head of the Southampton Water. In quantity by 

 the road-side at Great Testwood, six miles from Southton; Dr. A. D. 

 White. In our drier climate this plant scarcely attains to above half 

 the size it does in the western counties, where, as in Devonshire, I 

 have gathered it upwards of two feet in height. 



N.B. — Sempervivum lector um is excluded from this list of native 

 and naturalized Hampshire plants as being in every instance propa- 

 gated by the hand of man, and therefore not entitled to rank even 

 amongst those of the second category. It is to be lamented that this 

 and other vegetable productions foreign to our geographical position 

 and climate, as Swertia perennis, Crocus aureus, minimus, and sati- 

 vus, Gentiana acaulis, &c, &c, together with the entire of the Chan- 

 nel-Island plants, which are in no wider sense British than those of 

 the rock of Gibraltar or any other of our dependencies, should con- 

 tinue, through a servile compliance with established custom and 

 routine, often I am convinced in opposition to the better judgment 

 that would reject them, still to encumber and I may say disfigure the 

 pages of our general floras of the United Kingdom. I use the expres- 

 sion disfigure advisedly, because whatever destroys unity of design, 

 whether in works of art, fiction, or science, is as it were an excres- 

 cence on their true proportions, and therefore a disfigurement in the 

 strictest acceptation of the word. Why in the name of common sense 

 must Crocus sativus still be doomed to linger on the soil of Britain, 

 the shade of a defunct foreigner, — the merchant plant that has long 

 ceased to survive the extinction of that trade which called him from 

 his mountain home, in the Abbruzzi, to become like the Jew a deni- 

 zen of our isle for business purposes with no ulterior view of settle- 

 ment ? If the species in the concrete were inadmissible, how much 

 more absurd is it to retain it in the abstract — the shadow when the 

 substance has fled. It is, however, refreshing to observe how most of 

 these respectable representatives of by-gone error and blind devotion 

 to authority are, thanks to Messrs. Babington and Watson, " growing 

 less by degrees and infinitely small," and are not permitted by them 

 to go abroad without a guard of brackets or drawn daggers, to prevent 

 their breaking bounds and re-asserting their ancient but usurped right 



