1035 



Mr. Smith, I do not feel justified in admitting the species into the 

 Hampshire flora (except between brackets), without more satisfactory 

 evidence than the fact above stated supplies. Mrs. Robinson was 

 most assiduous in collecting the plants of her neighbourhood, and I 

 believe usually careful and exact in noting down their localities ; but 

 her collection embraced plants from other quarters of the kingdom, 

 and it is very possible that in this case some transposition of names 

 might have been committed in labelling the series of specimens, or 

 the latter may have been themselves shifted into papers not intended 

 for them, and inscribed with the locality for some other plant.* I 

 spent some hours in June, 1849, searching for this Carex on Titch- 

 field Common, without seeing a trace of it; but I might after all have 

 missed the spot, for the common is of immense extent, and would re- 

 quire several days to explore completely. C. incurva has not, 1 be- 

 lieve, been found further south in Britain than Forfarshire ; yet 

 would a leap of some 400 miles, from the sands of Barrie to Titch- 

 field Common, be not a wholly unprecedented, although sufficiently 

 startling instance of anomalous distribution amongst plants ; neither 

 would its appearance in a somewhat inland and even boggy station 

 be cause for much astonishment, seeing that C. arenaria, usually a 

 species of dry, sandy sea-shores, occasionally occurs at considerable 

 distances from the coast, in the like sandy and even (as we shall show in 

 speaking of that plant) wet or boggy spots. But besides that the soil 

 of Titchfield Common is not of a sandy character, the boggy nature of 

 the station here assigned to C. incurva does seem foreign to that 

 plant, as hitherto observed, and consequently affords very strong 

 grounds for disbelieving in the existence of this Carex in Hampshire. 

 Still the matter deserves further inquiry, and the attention of bota- 

 nists visiting Titchfield is hereby respectfully directed to the point. 



Carex divisa. In meadows, pastures, and grassy places, on or 

 near the coast, and in salt marshes ; very frequent both in the Isle of 

 Wight, and along the opposite shores of Hants. Frequent about 

 Ryde, in the marshy meadows behind the Dover, in a part of which it 

 constitutes a large proportion of the coarse herbage. In the meadow 

 behind Quarr Abbey, dividing Quarr Copse from Shore Copse. 

 Abundantly in the meadows betwixt Springfield and Nettleston 



* I think I understood from Mr. Smith, that the stations only, and not the name, 

 was written on the packets, as if the species had heen unknown to Mrs. K. I am 

 not sure if this he fact, hut if so, it lends much weight to the supposed discovery of 

 C. incurva, at Titchfield, coupled with the circumstance of there having heen more 

 than one paper found labelled as above. 



