155 



body had the means of fishing out plants from the depths of these 

 lakes, I am inclined to think he might find strange things. Near this 

 place, about three years ago, Mr. Evans, coming home late from a 

 christening, in stormy and rainy weather, was drowned. His corpse 

 could not be found by any means used for fishing. There being no 

 parson living at the jDlace at present, it is almost impossible for any 

 body to go herborizing thither. We had very hard and uncomforta- 

 ble lodging at the alehouse, and with difficulty got a young man to be 

 our interpreter and guide. At last young Mr. Evans, of Bangor, gave 

 us leave to lie at his house, and sent us provisions from Bangor. 



" If some rich botanist, that has no relations or children, would 

 build a house there, and buy some land to it, which might be done 

 with little money, it would be a very kind invitation for botanists to 

 visit these strange places, and be an inducement for making a collec- 

 tion of Welsh plants, as you proposed. Without such a fixed place 

 of abode, it seems to me impracticable." * 



Dillenius learned from the mountaineers of the neighbourhood, that 

 fish feed on the Isoetes ; and that when detached from its hold in the 

 soil and cast on shore, the cattle devour it greedily and grow fat on it.f 

 The passage is rather obscurely worded, and its meaning seems to 

 have been mistaken by compilers, who make it fatten the fish, and 

 leave the bullocks out of the question. 



The figures by Dillenius are striking, but in some points scarcely 

 accurate. That in the ' Flora Danica' (191) possesses none of the 

 characteristics which distinguish the root of our British species, and 

 this part of the drawing is either supplied from imagination or drawn 

 from a species hitherto undiscovered in this country. The same ob- 

 servation applies to the figure of the capsule in ' English Botany,' 

 (1084), where that part is represented as bivalved. Sir W. J. Hook- 

 er's figure in the ' Flora Londinensis ' is the best that I have seen, 

 but in this there is an indistinctness in the representation of the tuber, 

 and a reference to certain scales on the capsule, the existence of 

 which I have been altogether unable to detect. In Loudon's * Ency- 

 clopaedia of Plants' (894), the capsule of Pilularia is given as that of 

 Isoetes, and that of the latter is entirely omitted. 



The roots are three or four inches in length, flexible, semipellucid, 

 of uniform substance, tubular, and sometimes dichotomously divided 



* Linn. Correspondence, ii. 143. 

 t Referunt monticolas pisces, quos habent optimi generis, utraque hsec herba vesci, 

 et amnenta, si projectam inveniant, avide devorare et pinguescere. Hist. Muse, 542. 



N 2 



