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vegetable tissue, vet the attempts of a chemist at Glasgow to obtain a 

 permanent colouring matter or dye stuff from this plant have failed of 

 success. Some species of the genus, as M. tomentosa, are devoid of 

 colouring matter. The Miss Sibleys, of Hall Place, West Meon, in- 

 form me that cows greedily devour the herbage of M. perennis when 

 they can get at it, without injury to themselves, though reputed ex- 

 tremely poisonous to cattle and the human species. See Gardiner's 

 'Flora of Forfarshire,' p. 160. The Rev. Hugh Davies has seen this 

 species perfectly monoecious, like the following (Welsh Botan. p. 95). 

 Mercurialis annua. In waste and cultivated places about towns, on 

 banks and along suburban fences, and particularly in kitchen-garden 

 ground. Formerly not very uncommon in the Isle of Wight, but of 

 late years it has become exceedingly scarce here through the progress 

 of building effecting its extirpation.* In Ray's time it grew plenti- 



* Although given without an expression or mark of doubt as a genuine native by 

 those authors most inclined to dispute the indigenous origin of many a British plant, 

 I am strongly disposed to believe the annual Mercury more deserving of the asterisk 

 than a large majority of species to which that symbol of doubt has been affixed. In 

 the time of Gerarde and Parkinson it was evidently, from their accounts, much rarer 

 and more local than at present, and would seem chiefly to have grown in Kent and 

 on some parts of the south coast. Such distant localities as Rochester and Roraney 

 would hardly have been cited as stations by these old authors, had the species been 

 the abundant weed it has since become in so many parts of the metropolitan district. 

 Ray (Hist. Plant, i. p. 163) makes it rare by implication in his own day, for although 

 he says of it " reperitur in hortis olitoriis, vinctis, aliisque locis humentibus ac um- 

 brosis ;'' it is evident by the word vinctis he is speaking of its usual places of growth, 

 without reference to any country in particular, and it is remarkable that he gives as 

 an English station the shore of the very place from which I am writing; " In maris 

 littore prope Ryde Vectis insula? oppidulum sponte et copiosa provenit.'' Had he 

 been acquainted with habitats nearer his own part of England, he would surely have 

 mentioned them in preference to, or at least in conjunction with, one so remote as the 

 coast of the Isle of Wight. Besides that it has all the appearance of an introduced 

 species, the very ancient name of French Mercury seems to point at its foreign ex- 

 traction, although I would by no means insist much on this head apart from the other 

 considerations just urged, knowing how fallacious are inferences deduced from popu- 

 lar names alone. The most of us have heard that so late as the reign of Henry the 

 Eighth this country was chiefly supplied with esculent vegetables from Flanders ; is 

 it not likely that the annual Mercury may have migrated from the continent into 

 England when kitchen-gardens first began to be general, spreading with the progress 

 of horticulture from our south-eastern coast, where it would naturally be first esta- 

 blished, more and more widely through the land? In further confirmation of my 

 views on this subject, I will now quote the following curious passages from Tur- 

 ner's Herbal, the black-letter edition of Cologne, 1568, the description illustrated by 

 two excellent woodcuts of M. annua, pistillate and staminate. It is to be observed 



