677 



Market Harborough, were the original habitat, in which it was disco- 

 vered by Miss Kirby, and subsequently gathered plentifully by the 

 Rev. A. Bloxam. Dr. James Mitchell has found it in the river Leen, 

 and in the ditches of adjacent meadows, near Nottingham, 'certainly 

 not introduced.' (Bot. Gaz. i. 26). Dr. G. Johnston appears to have 

 been the first botanist who gathered the plant in this country, in the 

 neighbourhood of Berwick-on-Tweed. (Proceedings Bervv. Nat. 

 Club ; and Phytol. iii. 540). Mr. C. C. Babington informs me that 

 it has been also found in Duddingston Lock, near Edinburgh, by 

 Professor Balfour. In Staffordshire, according to Mr. Edwin Brown, 

 in Phytologist, iii. 647." — p. 474. 



Notwithstanding the pains which Mr. Watson has taken to arrange 

 species under distinct heads as regards their claim to be considered 

 truly indigenous ; notwithstanding, moreover, the lucid manner in 

 which the various terms of Native, Denizen, Colonist and Alien are 

 defined ; still it appears to us that these boundaries are rather drawn 

 too closely, and that Nature herself is destined to overleap them. If 

 we take, for instance, Mimulus luteus, of transatlantic origin, and ob- 

 serve how in a variety of distant localities it is extending and esta- 

 blishing itself; if we reflect on the extreme improbability of its ever 

 being exterminated, we shall be willing to excuse the unborn author 

 of a future Cybele who shall define it as Mr. Watson does the group 

 of 'denizens' to which the sweet violet is now referred. "At present 

 maintaining its habitats, as if a native, without the aid of man, yet 

 liable to some suspicion of having been originally introduced." Thus 

 there is not only a possibility, but a probability, that a species shall 

 advance with time from the station of ' alien ' to that of ' denizen,' 

 and perhaps a ' denizen ' such, for instance, as the sweet violet, may 

 take on its honoured, but unobtrusive presence, the title of ' native :' 

 or looking back on the past, instead of forward into the future, may 

 not the daisy have once been a ' denizen,' or still earlier an ' alien,' 

 although it now seems so thoroughly established as part and parcel 

 of the virgin turf ! 



K. 



