1861.] ADDRESS OF THE EDITOR. 9 



plants ; and this station for it is one of the most satisfactory of 

 British stations. It is as remote as it can well be from a centre 

 where the plant could have been cultivated, and it grows here in 

 so great abundance that the herbaria of all the botanists in Eng- 

 land might be furnished with specimens without detriment to the 

 locality of the plant. It covers, when in flower, another rare 

 species, Leucojmn (sstivum, a plant for some years lost, in its old 

 station, opposite Blackwall. 



Much importance will not be attached to the discovery of 

 Isatis tinctoria at the Wandsworth station of the West End 

 Crystal Palace railway. The banks of railways are notable for 

 producing many species which in the phyto-geographic phrase- 

 ology now current are very properly called suspected aliens. If 

 not aliens to the soil of Britain, they are aliens in these places. 

 Yet it is impossible to define very satisfactorily what are and 

 what are not alien species. Even here, as Mr. Lloyd very justly 

 observed in his notice of the above migratory plant, there are, 

 not a quarter of a mile lower down the contiguous line, three 

 plants which were unknown on Wandsworth Common less than 

 twenty years ago ; all of them non-migratory, most impatient of 

 removal and cultivation. How came they to their present loca- 

 lity ? Nobody doubts their British birth, though they are new 

 comers to the Wandsworth Common station, like the Isatis. If 

 plants are to be discarded quasi railway species, we should reject 

 Drosera, Lycopodium, and Osmunda, because we know that they 

 were recently introduced mto the station adjoining the railway, 

 where they are now found. One of them, the writer is sorry to 

 tell his readers, is no longer in that artificial swamp. Only a 

 few years ago it was there, but unluckily it attracted the atten- 

 tion of a young Wandsworth botanist, and he, as many others 

 do, made private property of a common plant. The plant still 

 exists, and may be seen by the curious in such matters. This 

 young disciple of Linnseus, who has not before his eyes the fear 

 of Mr. Hewitt Cotterell Watson, the eminent chorographic bo- 

 tanist, intimated, when he was chidden for taking away a rare 

 plant, the only one of the kind there, that he would transfer a 

 bit of the root to its original station. Surely the fact that the ■ 

 Royal Fern can be transplanted will not unsettle its claim as a 

 British species. But even if so, the fact that the Osmunda re- 

 galis can be transplanted, will not upset the nativity of the re- 



N. S. VOL. v. c 



