1010 



flowers and seeds, the species would seem to anybody who had not 

 witnessed its superabundance in spring, to be comparatively an unfre- 

 quent one. Here the Arum is the earliest and surest harbinger of that 

 welcome season, its leaves never failing, except in unusually severe 

 weather, to emerge from the ground during the first week in February,* 

 and to attain their full dimensions in March, when they are often 

 seared by the cutting east winds on exposed hedge-banks. I have 

 occasionally found a few specimens in flower in that month in the Un- 

 dercliff, although its proper season of inflorescence in this county is 

 from the middle of April till the beginning of June. Var. /3. Leaves 

 without spots ; almost as common as the spotted state. Var. y. 

 Leaves veined with greenish white ; about Bonchurch and Steephill, 

 not uncommonly. The varieties with spotted and plain leaves are al- 

 most equally common with us, and grow intermixed ; yet Reichen- 

 bach, with his usual mania for " splitting," makes two species of them, 

 A.vulgare and A. maculatum, and remarks, after giving the supposed 

 characters of each, "Utramque jam vivam observo, in eodem loco A. ma- 

 culatum per octo dies precocius est immaculato."f In this county I can 

 perceive no difference in the time of flowering, and the leaves of both 

 are alike variable in size and shape. The spotted form would appear 

 to be rarer towards the north, where, as in Sweden and Denmark, this 

 variety is nearly an entire stranger. Specimens occur with us occa- 

 sionally in which the leaves are broadly veined with greenish white, 

 as in the foreign A. italicum, by many botanists regarded as a variety 

 merely of our A. maculatum. The former, with which I have been 

 long familiar in the south of Europe, is a much larger plant than ours, 

 the leaves more perfectly hastate, with very divaricate lobes, that stand 

 out at nearly right angles to the midrib, which, as well as the lateral 

 veins, are for the most part strongly marked above with white ; the 

 leaves, too, are move uniform in shape, and do not exhibit the same 

 great diversity of outline as in A. maculatum, besides which they are 

 habitually evolved at the close of the year, and remain green through 

 the winter, which is rarely the case with the other, and then only, as 

 it were, accidentally in warm, sheltered situations, by a sort of natu- 

 ral forcing. A. italicum is the prevailing species over the south and 

 south-west of Europe, where A. maculatum is seldom seen except in 

 elevated places. I remarked it, on a journey from Orleans to Bor- 



* I have even remarked them springing up at the close of autumn at Bonchurch, 

 where in very sheltered spots, as near the old church, they are persistent the winter 

 through, as in Arum italicum. 



f Fl. Germ. Excurs. i. adden. et corrig. p. 138. 



