965 



fieldsaye (the Duke of Wellington's), on the northern limit of the 

 county, but in more abundance in the park, Miss E. Sibley !!! Here 

 the Fritillary grows by tens of thousands in the wet pasture and 

 meadow land, scattered over a vast acreage of the park, but most 

 abundantly towards the north-west end, and in the wet meadows be- 

 yond it, on the other side of the road (I believe in Berks, or in an 

 outlying portion of Wilts). The varieties with purple and white 

 flowers occur in pretty nearly equal proportion, and in a swampy 

 thicket at the north end of the park I gathered most luxuriant speci- 

 mens eighteen or twenty inches high. It has been long known to 

 grow near Reading, in the conterminous county of Berks and only a 

 few miles from Strath fieldsaye, and two other stations are given for it 

 in that county in the ' Catalogue of Newbury Plants ' several times 

 referred to in these Notes. 1 have not ascertained that the species 

 grows in all the woods about Strathfieldsaye, and believe my friend 

 speaks from the report of others, but it certainly does grow in wet 

 thickets there, and from what is recorded of a station further on it 

 would seem to be a sylvestral as well as a pratal plant in Hants. At 

 Bishop's Waltham, Mr. Jonas tells me, the children gather the Fritil- 

 lary for their May-day garlands, yet, in proof of the incurious nature 

 of the Hampshire peasantry, I could not find any one at Strathfield- 

 saye who knew its name; some called the plants snowdrops (the 

 white variety), others daffodils, whilst the rest pronounced them to 

 be cowslips ! The station at Droxford given in this journal (Phytol. 

 ii. 998) I understand since to be erroneous, or at least doubtful. 

 " Said to grow in Marvel Wood (near Win ton ?), but I have searched 

 more than once for it without success," Dr. A. D. White (in litt.). 

 So elegant a plant as the Fritillary, and one of so unusual an aspect 

 and comparative rarity, could not of course escape suspicion of being 

 an imported foreigner with that rather numerous class of persons who 

 appear to think Cowper's " fields without a flower"* no poetic ampli- 

 fication of the comparative deficiency of our British soil in the 

 choicer productions of the more favoured climates of France and 

 Spain. But here, as in other instances, their incredulity is founded 

 on misapprehension of the true nature and geographical range of the 

 species. Beauty of form and colour are so inseparably connected in 

 our minds with warmth of climate, because we see both developed in 

 the highest degree where the influence of such climatic condition is 

 greatest, that we are apt to assume the latter to be in all cases indis- 



* Task ; the.Tirae-piecc. 



