991 



Some Remarks on the specific characters of the Greater and Smaller 

 Butterfly Orchises {Platanthera chlorantha and bifolia). By 

 William Arnold Bromfield, M.D., F.L.S., &c. 



In a late pavt of my Catalogue of Hampshire Plants, in this journal 

 (Phytol. iii. 903 et seq.), I expressed myself in doubt of the value as 

 species of the greater and smaller butterfly orchises, although dis- 

 tinguished as such even by the older botanists of this kingdom, and 

 in our own day well illustrated by Mr. Babington in the seventeeth 

 volume of the ' Linnean Transactions.' A recent and renewed exami- 

 nation of these beautiful and fragrant plants, made on an extensive 

 series of each in a fresh state, from various parts of this neighbour- 

 hood and of Alton, has, I confess, removed much of the doubt I till 

 then felt on the question of their specific diversity. Still, it must be 

 owned there is too close a resemblance in the aspect, habit and struc- 

 ture of these Platantherae not to leave a suspicion behind, that with 

 all their apparently constant differences and well-marked characters, 

 they may nevertheless be but forms of a single species ; yet, since 

 it would be equally difficult to prove the negative as the positive pro- 

 position in the absence of intermediate states, which I am unable to 

 produce, I shall rest satisfied with assuming the truth of the latter, 

 and with pointing out, in corroboration of the views of those botanists 

 who hold the two plants indubitably distinct, some additional marks 

 of difference, together with the characters already laid down for their 

 discrimination, placing those of each kind in juxtaposition, in a sy- 

 noptic or tabular form, for readier comparison. It may with truth be 

 contended that our Platantherae differ from each other quite as widely 

 as do Orchis maculata and O. latifolia, which no botanist, so far as I 

 am aware, has had the hardihood to reduce to varieties of a single 

 species. 



Platanthera bifolia (the smaller butterfly orchis) I now find in 

 many of the beechen woodlands so extensively spread over the whole 

 neighbourhood of Alton, as in Akeuder Wood, Chawton Park, at 

 Medstead, and notably in woods by Kotherfield Park, as in Win- 

 chester Wood and Carter's Copse, as also in Froxfield Hangers, near 

 Petersfield,* from all of which stations, as well as from other places, 

 an abundant set of specimens was gathered a few days back, and 



* These beechen uplands produce copiously certain plants rather characteristic of 

 the flora of the northern or midland counties, as Hypericum dubium (more common 

 even than H. perforatum at Chawton and Rotherfield), and especially Epilobium 

 angustifolium, which, frequent though it be in Hants, occurs about Alton in bound- 



