180 KENTISH BOTANY. {Juue, 



wlieu Erasmus wrote his Peregrinatio Religionis, in whicli is in- 

 troduced a rather humorous account of this ancient custom, 

 •which scandalized the Protestant Dean Colet, and appears to 

 have only drawn a smile from the countenance, and a coin from 

 the pocket, of the liberal-minded Reformer. 



The memory of these superstitious usages has passed away. 

 The shoe is no longer, if existing, exhibited to excite the pious 

 admiration of the passenger. It is probably in the collection of 

 some virtuoso. We saw no objects of interest on Harbledown, 

 neither antiquarian nor vegetarian. 



At Harbledown, or rather on it, we observed Rumex pulcher, 

 far from an uncommon plant in Kent ; also Torilis infesta, an 

 infestive (noxious) weed about Southend, on the opposite coast : 

 here also Pohjstichum angulare was observed. These plants are 

 hardly worth recording, but they are entered as the only species 

 which were seen, not as rarities in this part of the country. Cen- 

 tranthus ruber grew on walls here and there in this city. 



About ten o'clock, on our second day's journey, we started 

 from Canterbury to Avalk to Sandwich, a distance of a dozen 

 miles, good measure. There is a fair and wide road to walk or 

 to drive on, but there is no public conveyance. Coaches and 

 omnibuses go to Dover, none to Sandwich. 



It is now nearly two hundred and thirty years since Thomas 

 Johnson, the famous editor of Gerard's ' Herbal,' with his friends 

 William Broad, Leonard Buckner, Robert Larkin, James Clarke, 

 etc., walked from Sandwich to Canterbury on an expedition like 

 that on which we were employed. Those who have the curiosity 

 to compare the results of these exploring botanists, who travelled 

 by the same road as ourselves, with the plants observed by us, 

 will find some, though not many, common to both the lists. 

 Johnson names upwards of a century of plants collected by his 

 company between Sandwich and Canterbury. Probably our list 

 will not contain one-tenth of the number which he observed. The 

 nomenclature usual in the first half of the seventeenth century 

 is a formidable impediment in the effort to compare the results 

 of the two journeys.^ 



* Mr. T. Johnson and his associates obserred above a hundred plants in their 

 ■walk from Sandwich to Canterbury. Of these only four or five are recorded in 

 the present list. Many more were probably seen, but they were not such as could 

 witli propriety be entered in an account of the rarer species observed. 



